Mercer felt slightly ridiculous. Not only was he "new boy", but as ship's
Medical Officer he was regarded by the crew with something less than respect.
He might be a fully qualified medico but his qualifications were required by
space travel regulations. He was definitely not a professional spaceman-and
therefore, to the other officers, simply an added burden to be coped with in
the daily routine of a perfectly safe ship.
Until disaster struck. Then suddenly Mercer's inexperience was equaled by that
of everyone else aboard. The crew knew what to do with the ship-and they were
very busy with it indeed.
The passengers, in their pathetic, plastic pods, unprepared and completely
helplessÈ were entirely Doctor Mercer's problem...

Also by James White
The Watch Below
The Aliens Among Us
All Judgment Fled
Deadly Litter
Major Operation
Star Surgeon
Tomorrow Is Too Far
Hospital Station
Published by Ballantine Books
LIFEBOAT
James White
BALLANTINE BOOKS ¥ NEW YORK An lntext Publisher   Copyright (c) 1972 by James
White Part of this work, under the title "Dark Inferno" was first published as
a serial in Galaxy Magazine, Copyright (c) 1972 by UPD Publishing Corporation.
AH rights reserved.
SBN 345-02797-3-125 First Printing: September, 1972.
Cover art by John Berkey.
Printed in Canada.
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. 101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 1003.

Table Of Contents
Chapter I. 4
Chapter II. 8
Chapter III. 13
Chapter IV. 18
Chapter V. 23
Chapter VI. 27
Chapter VII. 32
Chapter VIII. 37
Chapter IX. 41
Chapter X. 47
Chapter XI. 50
Chapter XII. 55
Chapter XIII. 60
Chapter XIV. 64
Chapter XV. 70
Chapter XVI. 75
Chapter XVII. 81
Chapter XVIII. 86
Chapter XIX. 92
Chapter XX. 97
Chapter XXI. 107



Chapter I.
The departure lounge was half full since the coach had left on its first trip
to the ship, but it had not grown any quieter. Excitement, impatience and
natural anxiety had combined to raise the noise level of every conversation
until the background music and its intended soothing effect were obliterated.
Ignoring the low and sinfully soft couches scattered around the large, cool
room, the remaining passengers for Eurydice clustered about the exit ramp like
jet travelers bucking for a seat by a window.
None of them were watching Mercer directly. Relieved, he dropped his eyes to
the papers which he had not been studying for the past half hour and wondered
if replacing them in his briefcase would be a signal for passengers to come
surging over to introduce themselves or ask questions. He already knew all of
their names, having memorized the passenger list, since his job would consist
largely of looking after them.
But right now they were still strangers-for the simple reason that he did not
know which face went with any given name. He decided to savor his last
remaining moments of introversion before he had to join the ship.
Mercer had no sooner made this decision and was beginning to feel pleasantly
guilty about it when a pair of small feet moved into the area of floor covered
by his downcast eyes and stopped a few yards in front of his chair. He looked
up slowly.
Black sneakers, black slacks, black tunic and long-visored cap, which carried
an improbable quantity of insignia and plastic scrambled eggs. The uniform had
probably been a good fit last Christmas, but now it was a little short and
tight. Even though the body overfilling the uniform was sturdy and
well-nourished, the face had the pinched, big-eyed look of the
over-imaginative, intelligent and probably highly nervous type. Mercer did not
have to read the identity patch on his chest to know that this was Robert
Mathewson, because there was only one ten-year-old boy on the passenger list.
They stared at each other for a long time, with Mercer feeling as tongue-tied
as the boy looked. This was ridiculous, he told himself irritably as the
silence began to drag and both their faces shifted deeper into the infrared.
This was, after all, his first social contact with a passenger, and one this
young should be easy- good practice for him, in fact.
Clearing his throat, he said, "I didn't know that we had been assigned a cadet
for this trip, but I can certainly use your help-" "Bobby, I told you not to
wander off!" said a voice from behind him. It was a feminine, harassed voice,
belonging, Mercer saw as he turned, to the boy's mother.
She was very young, dark-haired and with a face subtly distorted by tension
and worry, so that he could not decide whether it was pretty or downright
lovely. She rushed on, "You were told not to talk to strangers and that means
not making a nuisance of yourself to the ship's officers. I'm sorry about
this, sir.
You're obviously busy and he knows better than to..."
"It's quite all right, m'am," began Mercer, but already she was dragging her
son towards the largest group of passengers, still scolding and apologizing
and not listening to him at all.
For a few minutes he watched the boy in the space officer's outfit and his
mother in the issue coveralls which the passengers wore shipside. The
one-piece coverall was not exactly shapeless-especially not in Mrs.
Mathewson's case-but it obeyed the dictates of the current neo-puritan
fashion, which insisted on covering the female form on public occasions from
neck to ankles.
Suddenly restless. Mercer stuffed the papers back into his briefcase and stood
up. He began pacing slowly around the empty end of the lounge, staring at the
large, full-color pictures which were closely spaced along the walls so that
he would not have to look at, and perhaps become involved with, the
passengers. His first contact with two of them had not exactly helped his
self-confidence.
Like the background music, the pictures were designed to be reassuring-there
was only one take-off, a few interior shots, and the rest showed Eurydice or
her sister ships coming in to land beneath enormous, brightly-colored
dirigible parachutes, or floating in the ten-miles-distant landing lake and
held upright by a collar of inflated life pods while the passengers slid
laughing down a transparent tube into a waiting boat.
The pictures stressed the Happy Return rather than the Voyage itself. Mercer
thought cynically as he moved to the big periscopic window, which looked out
over the field.
Two miles away, Eurydice stood by her gantry, clean but for the passenger
boarding bridge. Only the topmost hundred feet or so of the ship proper,
comprising the control room, crew quarters and the upper members of the
structure which supported the rotating section, was visible. The service and
life-support modules, water tank, and nuclear power unit were wrapped in thick
swathes of boosters. A mile farther down the line stood the empty gantry which
had serviced Minerva before her departure four months earlier, and beyond
that, rippling faintly in the heat, there rose a ship identical to Eurydice
except for its much larger and more complex wrapping of boosters.
Nobody talked about that particular ship, and it did not have a name. Like the
homecoming pictures scattered around the lounge, it was meant to be a
reassuring sight, but somehow it was nothing of the kind.
The only difference between the passengers and himself, Mercer thought sourly,
was that he had nobody to talk loudly and nervously to...
"Eurydice, sir?"
He turned to find a hostess standing behind him.
She was wearing one of the old-style mirror plastic uniforms-described as
pseudo-futuristic by female fashion writers and with animal growls of
appreciation by men regardless of occupation-and for the first few seconds
that was all he saw. He was vaguely aware of glittering boots, a hat
streamlined for Mach Three and short cloak thrown back over shoulders that
were a flawless, creamy pink, and intensely aware of the rest of the get-up,
which was virtually topless and wellnigh bottomless. When he finally raised
his eyes, Mercer discovered that she was not just a beautiful body- she had a
nice face, too.
"The coach is waiting, sir," she said. Her smile was polite and not at all
impatient, and her eyes were laughing at him.
Mercer nodded and began walking briskly towards the exit, where the passengers
were already climbing the ramp, which led from the cool, blast-proof lounge to
the blistering heat of the surface one hundred feet above. She hurried to keep
pace with him, and Mercer wondered why until he realized suddenly that they
were, after all, fellow workers, servants of the same company, colleagues. The
realization made it possible for him to untie his suddenly knotted tongue.
"I'm sorry if I appeared rude back there," he said, trying hard to keep his
eyes on a level with her face, "but it seems to me that, to anyone leaving
Earth perhaps never to return, you make a very nice last impression. In fact,
if there was a little more time before take-off it would not take much to
convince me not to leave at all. Or come to think of it, when I get back in
eight months we could meet and maybe-" "What you are thinking would probably
get us both into trouble, with my husband," she broke in, laughing. "This is
your first trip, sir."
It was a statement with not the slightest suggestion of a question mark tacked
onto the end. Trying to hide his irritation. Mercer said, "I didn't think it
showed."
She was silent while they left the lounge and began to mount the flat spiral
ramp leading to the surface. The radiation doors which interrupted the
ascending tunnel every twenty yards had been dogged open, so that the hot,
dusty air from above was already reaching them. When she spoke, the last of
the passengers were out of sight and hearing, hidden by the curve of the
tunnel and their own self-generated wall of sound.
"It shows, sir," she said seriously, "but I'm learning caution in my old age.
You see, I don't seem to be able to give advice without also giving offence,
and so unless I'm asked..."
"I'm asking," said Mercer dryly.
She nodded and went on. "You are the tall, hungry-looking type who suits that
black rig-but you, especially, must be careful how you wear it. That rakish
angle of the hat is wrong for Eurydice, and some of your pocket zips are done
and some half-done-you haven't got that right, either, and at this stage of
the game you shouldn't even try. Even the plays which you've been watching so
carefully on TV never get it right, so don't feel too bad about it.
"This mystique with the zips and caps which veteran spacemen practice," she
went on, "began as sheer sloppiness, no doubt, but now the so-and-sos change
the rules after every trip just to confuse people. But you, sir, are not yet a
veteran, so it is much better that you don't get it at all than get it wrong.
In any case, there are two officers on every ship who do not subscribe to
these little idiosyncrasies of dress. They are the Captain, who is too
important to care about such things, and the other is you, sir, who is
generally considered to be the lowest form of life in the service and who is
not supposed to get ideas above his station.
But you know all this already, I hope."
She was watching him intently, but she relaxed when he smiled and said, "I was
told, but not precisely in those words. The general idea seems to be that
since our passengers have to be physically fit to be allowed to make the trip
in the first place, my medical know-how is not essential, and since I have no
other specialized technical training useful in space, my duties will be
largely those of a steward. The responsibility for ensuring that the customers
have a happy and comfortable trip is mine, apparently, and up until now, I'm
sorry to say, the thought of mixing with and looking after more than forty
healthy people has me scared stiff-"
"You are being too negative, sir!" she broke in sharply. "You may be little
more than the ship's steward, but you must not act like one or even think like
one. And you apologized to me twice during, oh, five minutes of conversation.
That's bad. You must be the strong, silent type if you want to gain the
respect of your charges. Failing that, you can be the weak, silent type-just
so long as you're silent, reserved, somewhat aloof at all times and never tell
them your troubles. Remember that the passengers don't know that you are just
a glorified steward, and they must never suspect that you are their servant or
your first trip will be hell, and your last so far as Eurydice is concerned.
Because if even once you have to go to the real officers with a passenger
problem, your name is mud, and you'll never-" She was beginning to sound
rather emotional. Mercer thought. He held up his hand and said, "What did I
ever do to you?"
She was quiet for the next dozen paces, then she laughed and said, "Not a
thing. But you can return my favor if you like. I would like to have a few
extra minutes on board. If I could stay up there with the first group of
passengers while you took up the second batch, I really would appreciate that,
sir."
Return what favor? Mercer wondered, then thought that her advice and criticism
had been just that, even if it had nearly lifted the skin off his back. He
nodded.
"Oh, thank you, sir."
Definitely the emotional type, he thought.
A few minutes later they reached the upper end of the ramp and stood blinking
in the twin glare of the afternoon sun and the mirror-bright coach. His dark
uniform soaked up the heat like a thermal sponge, and beside him the girl
became a glittering, truncated cone as she pulled the cloak around her
shoulders.
"Sorry to spoil your view," she said, "but I don't tan in the sun, I frizzle
up. You take the seat beside mine at the rear-you'll have more leg-room-and
ignore the flashing lights on my call panel. People always sit on the arm-rest
buttons while finding a seat.
Be with you in a minute, sir."
By the time she rejoined him he had used the cosmetic mirror set into her
service panel to adjust his cap, which was now absolutely straight and as
level as the distant blue line of the landing lake. He had already checked his
zips. The coach was already picking up speed towards Eurydice's gantry and the
noise level was keeping pace with it. Two seats in front of them a man was
complaining bitterly because the coaches weren't big enough to move everyone
to the ship at the same time, another was insisting that at the price this
trip was costing his company he was damn well going to watch the take-off from
a port, and from farther along the coach two different call lights were
blinking.
"It's high time," said Mercer, rising, "that I started getting to know my
patients-I mean passengers."
Her small, strong hand pushed him back into the seat.
"I'll handle it," she said. "Until they are all trussed up and safe in their
acceleration couches they are my responsibility. Sit there, and save your
strength."
Chapter II.
Because it was a widely accepted fact that many people could undertake plane
trips and even interplanetary voyages without qualms and yet be scared silly
by three hundred feet of altitude, the elevator which took Eurydice's
passengers up to the main entry lock was completely enclosed. But that
low-ceilinged, windowless cage had a very subduing effect, Mercer noted. It
was as if the passengers realized that they were taking their first tiny step
spacewards and that there was still time to step back. Or was he simply
putting thoughts into the passengers' minds because the same thoughts were
going through his own?
The cage was uncomfortably crowded, but the passengers were somehow managing
to keep their distance from each other, and they did not even look at him.
Starting to introduce himself in these conditions was impossible-he would
simply make himself look and sound ridiculous. But he could at least nod at
young Mathewson without loss of dignity or doing irreparable harm to his
image.
But the boy tried to salute him and jabbed a passenger in the stomach with his
elbow, his mother grabbed his arm and began apologizing all round, and Mercer
retreated behind his personal wall of silence wondering, as they reached the
top and the passengers preceded him into the ship, if it was possible to
project an image so strong and silent that he would not have to speak to
anyone at all for the entire four months of the trip.
First Officer Prescott was waiting for him just inside the outer seal. He ran
his eyes quickly from Mercer's cap to his sneakers and back again, looking
faintly surprised, but when he spoke he sounded more than faintly
disappointed. "I thought you weren't going to make it. What kept you?"
"I was told to come aboard with the last coachload of passengers..." began
Mercer. But Prescott was obviously not listening, so he concentrated on being
strong and silent again as he passed into the lock antechamber. He could feel
his face burning, so the chances were that he was fooling nobody but himself.
The Captain was standing just inside the seal, looking cool, correct, and with
his features, if anything, stiffer than his too-erect body. He was looking
through Mercer and the double hull behind him at some remembered object or
event, which claimed all of his attention.
He had met Collingwood and the other officers very briefly during his
training, and the Captain had been the only -ship's officer who had not made
him feel like crawling under the nearest stone. But now it looked as if
Collingwood was angry about something, probably the misdemeanor of the girl
deserting half a coachload of passengers. Perhaps one of them had actually
complained to him about it, and now she was standing beside the Captain
looking as if she was about to cry.
Mercer felt sorry for her. She was very easy to like and even easier to feel
sorry for, and in a way he was responsible for her trouble because he had
agreed to her request. He wanted badly to apologize but remembered that she
did not like people who apologized too often. He stopped. The Captain was
still staring into the middle distance, not even seeing him.
"Good-bye, m'am," he said.
It came close to being the shortest and most uninspired farewell of all time,
but her reaction literally rocked him back on his heels.
"Take care of yourself," she said, standing on tiptoe and giving him a very
warm but sisterly kiss on the cheek. Then she looked at him very seriously and
added, "Take care of all of them, sir."
Mercer had instinctively put his arms around her waist, both to keep his
balance and because it seemed to be the thing to do, then let them drop to his
sides. She had not, he saw, committed some trifling misdemeanor and been told
off for it-there was far too much tension and sheer misery in her expression.
He wondered what kind of trouble could make a girl with a disposition like
hers react like this, and if he could help. But today he seemed to have left
his inspiration in his other suit, and all he could manage was a sickly smile
and a line of dialogue, which was too trite for words.
"What about your husband, m'am?"
"He doesn't mind," said the Captain, "provided you two don't make a habit of
it." Suddenly he laughed, and the girl began laughing too-the way people did
who were trying hard not to cry. She turned from Mercer to hang a stranglehold
on the Captain's neck.
The kiss she gave him was anything but sisterly.
Mercer was still staring at them when Prescott's finger dented his shoulder.
"Are you some kind of voyeur, Mercer? We have work to do upstairs."
"Yes, sir."
But when they had climbed to the passenger level Prescott paused for a few
moments before continuing towards the control deck. Pitching his voice low
because of the passengers lying all around them, he said, "They're all yours,
Mercer. Keep them quiet and comfortable and don't let anyone be sick outside
of his plastic bag-that is funny only on television. If you should have a
problem, hesitate before calling on me for help-hesitate for as long as
possible because we will be very busy and will not take kindly to doing your
job for you. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
Prescott shook his head. "You have made a great start to your first voyage,
Mercer, and I shudder to think of what you might do before it ends. I mean,
practically making love to the Captain's wife before his very eyes-" "At the
risk of sounding a cad, sir," said Mercer, "she started it."
"And another thing, Mercer. We do not salute or click heels or call anyone
'sir' except the Captain, and he does not insist on it. Invisible discipline
is what we aim for, and an air of relaxed informality- well, informality
anyway. Just look after your passengers without getting too close to any of
them and keep out of the way of the ship's officers-"
"It looks as if I'll have a very lonely trip, Mr. Prescott," said Mercer
quietly, but he was unable to keep the anger from showing in his tone. "In my
experience," Prescott replied in a voice that was sarcastic rather than
actively hostile, "people like you take a trip like this as a means to an end.
In - your profession, space experience automatically puts you at the head of
the queue where the juiciest research appointments are concerned, and even in
private practice it is enough to allow you to triple your fees. Perhaps we
will be lucky; you will stay out of trouble with the passengers, keep yourself
to yourself and spend your free time in your cabin studying some of those
books you brought along."
"You'll be lucky."
Prescott ignored both the anger and the ambiguity in Mercer's reply. He said,
"I hope so. But you are going to have company in a moment and I haven't time
to chat, even to overexposed ministering angels. See you."
Mercer turned as the First Officer continued his climb to the cone. The two
hostesses who had been checking and strapping in the passengers on arrival
were just a little overexposed, and neither could hold a candle to Mrs.
Captain. Or maybe it was just that his artistic appreciation had been deadened
by the recent exchange with Prescott. He nodded, uncomfortably aware that his
face was still red.
"The passengers are settled in, sir," said the darkhaired one. "All have been
given medication, but you might keep an eye on Mr. Saddler and Mr. Stone, who
may be trying to prove something-I think they palmed their capsules."
Mercer nodded without speaking.
"Don't let him bother you, sir," said the blonde one, reading his expression
if not his mind. "He is an exceptionally good officer, believe it or not, even
if he does lack charm."
"Surely," said Mercer, "you aren't his mother?"
The girl laughed. "No, and nobody said they loved him. But we have to go now
and separate the Collingwoods-they swing in the boarding gantry in five
minutes. Good luck, sir."
"And good hunting," added the other.
When they had gone Mercer stood for a moment looking slowly around the
passenger deck, feeling lonely despite being knee-deep and surrounded within a
wall to wall carpet of people, most of whom were staring at mm. This is just
like the simulator, he told himself firmly, complete with ship noises, muted
countdown from the wall speakers, the paint and plastic smell of the
acceleration couches, and the pressure of cool, artificially fresh air on his
face-exactly the same, except that the couches were not being occupied by
bored junior clerks from the administration building next door and the sounds
and smells were real.
His job now was to give real comfort and reassurance to his charges, not just
the simulated kind.
According to the instruction book and the psychologist who had taken him
through it, it was a simple job. At this stage the passengers were already
wrapped in broad acceleration webbing; even the shape of the couches was
reminiscent of a cradle, and the calm, competent figure of a ship's officer
moving among them was a father-figure tucking them in for the night. Greeting
them individually by name, making a perfunctory check on the tightness of
their straps, asking if they were comfortable, and dealing, very briefly, with
any special problems they might have was all that was necessary to reassure
them at this time.
At this time, his psychologist-instructor had added drily, he had over forty
people to process pre-flight-wise and less than sixty minutes to do it in, so
there was just not the time to undertake deep analysis.
Surprisingly, it was simple.
The couches were laid out parallel and with the passengers' heads pointing in
the same direction so that they could all watch the large projection screen
set on the underside of the deck above. The walking space between them was
about six inches wide, except where the curvature of the inner hull allowed
more. He knelt briefly beside each couch, reading the passengers' name tags as
he checked their straps, saying the prescribed words, and keeping an eye on
the time by not looking at his watch in the same way that he did not seem to
be looking at the name tags stitched to their coveralls when he spoke to them.
He had to give the impression of being calm, unhurried, and concerned with
their individual welfare, the book said, and theoretically he could take all
the time he needed to ensure his passengers' comfort before takeoff. This was
a passenger ship, after all, and a problem with one or more of the passengers
was the only acceptable reason short of a serious malfunction for calling a
Hold.
But Mercer would have to have a very strong reason for holding or the
launch-control people would have caustic things to say, the Captain would
probably go critical, and Prescott, who seemed to be a pretty poisonous
character at the best of times, would certainly make his life miserable for
the rest of the voyage.
"Are you comfortable, Mr. Saddler?" Mercer said pleasantly to the next in
line; then he stopped. This was one of the tough guys who had not taken his
medication. Mercer stared at the man's face without really seeing it while his
mind sought in vain for a pleasant and friendly way of telling him to take his
and-nausea pill and not be a fool. By the end of the allotted minute Mercer
still did not have the answer, and he saw that the passenger's face was
becoming apprehensive and that he was refusing to meet Mercer's eyes. Suddenly
he wriggled sideways in his straps so that he could reach his breast pocket.
"I'm sorry," he mumbled, "I nearly forgot to take my pill."
"It can happen," said Mercer pleasantly, "in the excitement."
The next two couches were occupied by the Mathewsons. Judging by the glazed
look in her eyes, one of the hostesses had seen fit to slip Mrs. Mathewson a
small-calibre sleep bomb, which was already taking effect. Perhaps she had
been frightened. Her son's eyes were enormous, but not with fear. Mercer found
himself envying the hot, bright, uncomplicated excitement of the boy. With
Mercer there was very little that happened for the first time. When it did
happen for the first time, as it would in a very few minutes from now, the
sensation would be diluted and deadened by the emotional impurities of fear
and guilt; and by | his maturity and intelligence, which would insist on ||
computing his chances of meeting disaster during the " period of maximum
stress that was takeoff; and by the other excitements of his short adult life,
which had reduced his capacity to respond to this one. He wondered suddenly if
the real reason for his being here was the fear that if he had stayed put he
would have used up Earth and everything it had to offer and joined everyone
else in the desperate search for small variations on old sensations.
Mercer smiled. Compared with the life most of his friends had led, his had
been almost monastic. Below him, Bobby Mathewson smiled back.
The next couch was empty, for the very good reason that it was his own. Beyond
it was the one belonging to Stone, the other passenger suspected of missing
out on his pre-takeoff medication. Mercer tried the blank stare on him that
had worked so well with Saddler, hoping that the man's guilty conscience would
do the rest, but Stone simply stared back at him. Maybe his conscience was
clear. Mercer had to be content with clearing his throat loudly and slipping a
plastic bag between the other's chest straps where Stone could reach it
quickly.
They would be different people in space, he thought as he gave a careful last
look around. Different but not necessarily better. The book had gone into
great detail regarding the odd quirks and outright personality
changes-naturally occurring, of course, not those induced by drugs-which some
people developed during space voyage. It went into even greater detail about
the deep-rooted psychological reasons for it. Mercer sighed, lay down on his
couch, and swallowed his own anti-nausea medication while he was strapping in.
On the screen above him the picture of Eurydice and the gantry was replaced by
a view of the distant hills and landing lake as someone switched to the
onboard TV camera. He slipped on his headset and said, "Mercer. Passenger
section ready."
Collingwood's voice sounded in his earpiece. "So I see. But are you quite sure
that they are all settled and medicated? I realize that you are keen and are
probably trying to impress me with your efficiency, but I shall not be
impressed if a lot of passengers try to turn themselves inside out while we
are dumping the boosters."
The tone softened a little as he went on. "Missing the pip is an inconvenience
these days instead of a disaster. Our launch window is as wide as we want to
make it, so if there is anything worrying you that might require a Hold, let's
have it, Mercer."
While the Captain had been talking. Mercer had been thinking about Stone and
wondering how he could explain his suspicions without sounding like a fussy
old woman. He couldn't.
"No problems, sir."
"Good. We lift in four minutes."
Mercer spent the time checking that the vacuum cleaner under his couch was
handy and worrying about the period of weightless maneuvering, which would
begin when they went into Earth orbit. Both the book and his instructor had
painted awful pictures of weightless nausea running wild. It could become
critical, they had said, a chain reaction, which could spread even to those
who had taken medication, and the job of clearing the air was difficult and
distasteful. An incident like that was the one thing guaranteed to sour the
whole voyage.
He was still worrying when the boosters ignited and acceleration piled
invisible weights on his chest. The projection screen showed the launch
complex and landing lake shrinking below them. More and more territory crawled
in from the edges of the screen: the pale cross-hatching of a town, the grey
smears of mountains flattened by the near-vertical sunlight, tiny layers of
shadow sandwiched between the ground and the clouds.
He moved his head carefully so as to watch Stone.
Anyone with a TV in their living room had seen it all before.
Chapter III.
"This is the Captain, ladies and gentlemen. I hope that you are comfortable
and that you will have a pleasant trip. We shall make two complete orbits of
Earth, during which a number of minor course-corrections will be necessary for
us to match orbits with Station Three to dump our boosters. Please remain
strapped in until these maneuvers are completed, which will be in a little
under four hours after we reach the vicinity of the station.
"During the next fifteen minutes you will notice periodic fogging of the
picture of Earth's face being projected on your screen," he went on quietly.
"This is in all respects normal and is caused by the venting of surplus fuel
from the boosters prior to their delivery at Station Three. Thank you."
"Roughly translated," Prescott's voice continued in Mercer's ear-plug,
"nothing out of the ordinary is happening except that we are slightly off
course due to us taking off exactly on time. Nobody bothers to do that these
days and launch control don't have to be all that accurate, either. In the old
days this sort of thing would have been very serious. But now, with virtually
unlimited reaction mass-" "Careful, Bob," broke in the Captain's voice, "or
you'll be lecturing again."
"Nobody listens," said Prescott shortly, then went on: "As a result we shall
be using booster steering power at increasingly frequent intervals as we
approach Three. During the final thirty minutes. Mercer, keep a sharp eye on
your passengers."
"Will do," said Mercer, then added: "In the meantime we will be weightless
practically all of the time, as I understand it. Have I permission to rig the
cabin dividers?"
"Yes," said Prescott.
Mercer lay unmoving for perhaps a minute, thinking about Prescott and the
Captain. The First Officer, who was not a pleasant personality to begin with,
was being actively unpleasant towards him, probably to remind him firmly and
continuously that he was a space officer in name only. In complete contrast
was the Captain, who was patient and considerate and, so far as Mercer could
see, pleasant to everyone including Prescott. He wondered if the other
crew-members would emulate Prescott or the Captain in their behavior towards
him, or if it would fall somewhere in between. He supposed that it would
depend on how they had been raised to think of second-class citizens.
But suppose Prescott's feelings towards him were shared by the others - even
by the Captain - and the only difference was that the first officer's
reactions were honest while those of the others were cloaked, for the moment,
by surface kindliness and consideration.
Mercer shook his head angrily, trying to derail this highly uncomfortable
train of thought. Surely he could take a little unpleasantness for the
duration of the trip. Large numbers of people on Earth were made to feel
inferior for each and every day of their lives. But he still felt like telling
Prescott what he could do simply to relieve his feelings, and suddenly there
was something he could tell the First Officer to do. He thumbed the transmit
switch.
"Mercer. Our TV picture of the surface is cork-screwing as well as fogging.
Too much of that might make our passengers feel uncomfortable. Can you-" The
screen went blank and Prescott said, "Right. Do you want to show a film
instead?"
"I don't think so," Mercer replied. "Watching me trying to tie down the cabin
dividers should be entertainment enough."
Before releasing his harness he waited to see if Prescott would have the last,
unpleasant word, then decided that Collingwood had probably told the First
Officer to go easy on the new man.
The main supports for the cabins were two tough plastic rings just over half
the interior diameter of the passenger module. Together with the four main
support ropes and the inner spacer lines which kept the rings apart, the rings
were clipped at intervals of a few feet to the underside, of the deck above,
so as to keep the cordage from coming adrift during acceleration. Mercer
pulled himself around the anchored rings, releasing the fastenings and tossing
the main supporting ropes very gently towards the deck below-all except the
last one, the end of which he wrapped around his hand. Turning head downwards,
he sighted himself at the rope's lashing point between two couches and, with
all eyes upon him, kicked out hard.
In theory, the mass and momentum of his body would draw out the double rings,
whose inertia would slow him to a stop before he actually hit the deck.
But Mercer, who had practiced this operation in a ground simulator with a
system of weights duplicating the effect of weightlessness, had been sure that
if he kicked too hard he would crack his skull on the deck or, if his aim was
bad, bury it in someone's stomach.
As a result he was a little too cautious; he did not succeed in pulling both
rings far enough from their housing. Instead of reaching the deck, his
misjudged dive stopped a few feet above the acceleration couches, and he began
to swing towards the middle of the compartment.
Ignoring the grins as well as the eyes watching him, he cleared his throat and
said, "Would one of you mind grabbing my feet?"
Immediately the deck sprouted a forest of clutching hands, which eventually
succeeded in checking his swing. But the rings had begun to swing as well,
giving him a lot more slack on the support rope he was holding, so that he
toppled slowly and very gently across two doubly-upholstered couches, the
upper layers in both cases being female. The layer called Miss MacRoberts
giggled, and the other, whose name he could not read because of the
topological features distorting her identity patch, said "Pleased to meet
you."
Mercer apologized gravely and began moving back to the lashing point by
gripping the edges of intervening couches with his free hand and pulling
himself along.
Within a few minutes he had the support rope in position and pulled taut.
Above him the two rings swung and vibrated slowly, shaking their attached
cordage into the beginnings of a weightless tangle. Mercer dived carefully
across the deck, snatched the second support rope out of the air as he passed
it, and checked himself with the other hand against the couch beside its
lashing point. He was beginning to get the hang of it.
By the time the first surge of steering thrust came he had the supporting
lines in position and was beginning to weave a double web of cabin dividers
between the now-rigid rings and the inner skin of the hull. His ear-piece had
bleeped a five-second acceleration warning, so he had plenty of time to wedge
himself between two couches and hold on. But when it came the surge was so
gentle and his grip on the couch edges so tight that he felt ridiculous. When
a double bleep signaled the cessation of thrust he nodded silently to the
passengers on each side of him and returned to work.
During the next three hours the surges came with increasing frequency, but he
was usually close enough to a bulkhead or one of the rings to hold on until
they had passed-although on one occasion he misjudged, ending the weightless
tumble which followed with an awkward handstand on the edges of someone*s
couch so as to avoid butting them in the stomach.
It was not easy to maintain a pleasantly grave expression or to pretend that
this sort of activity was in all respects normal as he murmured "Sorry, m'am"
and returned, like an industrious, if ungainly, spider, to weave his web.
Looking incredibly fragile and completely purposeless, his double web neared
completion despite these interruptions. In its sub-orbital configuration
during the initial, powered stage of their trip, the thing was simply a highly
porous obstruction to anyone wanting to watch the screen. But when the
reactor, which would give them a half-G of thrust for the first two days of
the flight, closed down, artificial gravity would be supplied by spinning the
passenger section about the longitudinal axis of the ship. The walls of the
inner hull would then become the floor and the double web would support
clip-on plastic sheets, and the passengers would have cabins and privacy of a
sort.
The cabins would even be roofed over, so that crew members moving along the
weightless axis between control and the power module aft would not be able to
see the sort of things that were reputed to go on in passenger-carrying
spaceships.
People tended to forget the rules when they were far from home, his instructor
had warned him, and the degree of forgetfulness was in direct proportion to
the distance.
His mind was not entirely on his job, he realized suddenly, or he would not
have missed hearing the thrust warning. As it was, he found the section of
support ring he was working on moving away from him, and he instinctively
tightened his grip on the attached line he was holding.
Just as the line was drawing taut against its ring, thrust was applied at
right angles to the previous surge and he began a slow swing around the
support ring, a swing which would ultimately wrap his line tightly around the
ring. For a few seconds this did not worry him, but then he realized that as
the line wound itself tight it would shorten and his speed of rotation would
increase-it was speeding up already, in fact. With his free hand he reached
for one of the divider ropes as it whirled past, but could only touch it. All
he succeeded in doing was to start himself spinning on the end of his rope as
well as describing diminishing circles around the ring.
Dizzy and confused, Mercer tried to work out how fast he would be traveling by
the time his line was completely wound around the ring. Almost certainly it
would be too fast for him to transfer his grip from the rope to the ring, and
if he let go at that speed he would go bulleting into the deck, bulkheads, or
passengers like a stone from a slingshot. The time to let go was now, while he
was still moving relatively slowly. But his hand seemed to have a mind of its
own -the more he thought of letting go the stronger became its grip on the
rope.
Mercer closed his eyes and tried to think. He had more than two feet of slack
wrapped around his hand if he released that, then the radius of his swing
would be increased and his rotation slowed. He would do just that, and hold on
to the last few inches of rope until he was swinging towards the inner hull
wall, then bend his knee to absorb the shock of landing and let go.
But the end of the rope slipped from his hand before he was ready, and he went
rumbling slowly toward the center of the deck. For a moment he thought that he
would be fantastically lucky and land on his own couch, but instead he landed
sprawling on the one beside it.
The passengers began to applaud, and Mrs. Mathewson said crossly, "Do you
always try to land on defenseless women?"
"Only the pretty ones, m'am," Mercer said before he realized that his great
relief at not breaking his neck was possibly not shared by the passenger he
had landed on. But before he could apologize properly his earpiece bleeped a
thrust warning and he squirmed into his own couch.
He had the webbing around his ankles when thrust tilted him gently to one
side, then the other, then tried to lift him out of the couch and twist him at
the same time. Someone grunted and gave an odd-sounding cough. Mercer swung
around to see the passenger called Stone rapidly filling his plastic bag.
Stone had been a little late in getting the bag to his mouth, and some of the
material was drifting above his couch where the next surge of acceleration
would send it flying all over the place. With his feet still held by the
webbing Mercer unclipped the sucker from the underside of his couch and went
after the stuff, pulling it into the small but powerful vacuum cleaner and
leaving in its place a fresh smell of pine trees and heather. Then he helped
Stone until he was quite finished, sponged his face and produced a water tube
and an anti-nausea pill.
"Sorry about that, Mr. Stone," he said drily, "but there are some people who
seem to need double the usual medication."
As he swallowed it, Stone had the grace to blush.
"Mr. Mercer," said Prescott in his earpiece. "Attitude maneuvers are
completed. Will you come to control as soon as convenient." His tone was
almost polite, which made Mercer feel very uneasy.
His first impulse was to rush to control right away and take what was coming
to him for his recent stupid and dangerous display of weightless acrobatics.
But ten more minutes' work would complete the rigging of the cabin dividers,
and he might just as well go up there with one job done properly, even if he
had nearly killed himself doing it. While he was tightening the last rope the
screen above him lit up with a clear sharp, and rock-steady picture of Space
Station Three.
A few seconds later he made a slow, careful dived towards the well, which
connected the passenger compartment with control and rose past the level of
the officers' cabin and the enclosed ladder used when the ship was under power
or on the ground. He did not bump against anything on the way up, so
apparently his weightless movements were becoming more accurate as a result of
the last few hours' acrobatics.
Even so, he was feeling far from confident as he checked his dive at the entry
to control, made sure that his zips were properly fastened and his cap was
still on straight, and entered...
Prescott pointed at the empty couch and said angrily, "Lie there, Mercer.
Watch the screens or look out of the window. Don't touch anything."
Communications Officer MacArdle and the engineer, Neilson, looked angry as
well. So did the Captain.
But Collingwood tried to smile as he said, "You did very well, Mercer. But as
an entertainer you should avoid over-exposure, and you were in danger of-"
"Fracturing your skull," snapped Prescott.
'Tm sorry about that," said Mercer. "I missed hearing the thrust warning and
got caught-"
"You missed hearing it," said Prescott furiously, because MacArdle was so
interested in your performance that he forgot to send it. But even a medical
officer with a fractured skull would probably not be enough to put a Hold on
this trip. I have never in my life seen a lousier, more slapdash launch-"
"Leave it. Bob," said the Captain tiredly. To Mercer he added, "Mr. Prescott,
you may already have noticed, is an astronaut of the old school whose
experience goes back to the time before space travel was officially declared
safe. He is inclined to fuss sometimes."
"At least let Neilson and I eye-ball the drive grids as we're dumping the
boosters . . ." began Prescott.
Collingwood's hand twitched as if he had been about to point at the displays
around them, and he said, "Bob, there's no need." He paused, looked at Neilson
for a moment, then added, "But to keep you happy, we'll have the station send
up close-ups of the withdrawal sequence."
"The definition," said Prescott, "will be too poor to resolve the fine details
or show . . . Oh, forget it."
He stared angrily at, or maybe through. Mercer, who tried to pretend that he
wasn't there.
As he looked at his twin displays-one showing his charges in the passenger
module and the other the same picture as they were seeing on their screen--he
wondered why Prescott had sent for him if not to give him a ticking off.
Mercer's instructor had told him that some medics were never allowed into the
control room until several weeks of a voyage had elapsed. This could have been
a compliment; a pat on the back for being a good, hard-working boy-except for
the fact that Prescott so obviously did not like him.
Maybe that was why he was here. Prescott did not like anybody, it seemed, and
this was his way of showing it. He had told off MacArdle in such a way that
the communications officer would be just as angry with Mercer as he was with
Prescott. Everybody, even the cool and normally easy-going Captain, was angry
with Prescott, and they were only four hours out. Mercer was beginning to
wonder if he should have stayed at home.
But then his eyes went to the direct vision port and his doubts faded. The
television pictures of this had only been a shadow of the reality and, one way
or another, a man could willingly pay an awful lot to see scenery like this.
Chapter IV.
Station Three had begun to kill its rotational velocity long before Eurydice
had been launched. Now it hung motionless like a gigantic, uncompleted wheel
comprising six tubular spokes arranged in two diametrically opposed groups of
three, and two short tubular sections of rim which linked each group of spokes
at the periphery. Unlike its smaller predecessors. One and Two which were
structurally complete and no longer capable of further growth, Station Three
was still only a pup.
It would take many years of time and effort, and Eurydice and her sister ships
would have to pay it a large number of passing visits to donate their
boosters, before its thirty spokes and far-flung rim would be completed,
because it was the boosters wrapped around the ships' stem and waist sections,
emptied of the fuel, which formed the building blocks of the vast wheel.
Upwards of four thousand people would inhabit the station then, conducting the
more exotic types of research, which would ultimately put space and time and
gravity to effective use and make slow-burners like Eurydice as obsolete as
dugout canoes. One of its first, and perhaps easiest jobs, would be to impose
a strict control on the Earth's weather.
Later it might give men the stars, or, if not a faster-than-light drive, then
the longevity to reach them. It would support and extend the work already
being done on the bases of the Jovian moons.
That was the kind of work that Mercer wanted to do, among people who freely
admitted to being insane for living how and where they did, and who tried to
put at least as much into their highly technical culture as they got out of
it--a culture which was neither as permissive as Earth's of the past decades
or as viciously forbidding as the neo-puritan one which was beginning to
replace it.
Mercer was too cynical to believe that the people of the Jovian colonies had
built a Utopia for themselves; it was simply that they had been very
thoroughly screened. There was no mesh in the screen, of course, but it was up
to six hundred million miles thick, and anyone who made it through that screen
even once had to be someone very special in one way or another-of that Mercer
had been very sure, until the crew of Eurydice had started leaving clay
footprints all over his nice bright illusions.
"Withdrawal sequence starting ... now," said the Captain, arousing Mercer from
his day-dream.
"Neilson, stand by. MacArdle, ask Three for a long lingering close-up of our
tail and be careful how you phrase it." He smiled, looked at Prescott, and
stopped smiling as he added, "As soon as we clear the boosters we will roll
the ship. All of you take a long, hard look."
Prescott made no comment. He was staring at Neilson, who did not look at all
happy.
Mercer divided his attention between the port and his screens as the crew
began playing an esoteric game involving the calling out of numbers and groups
of initial letters while their fingers tapped illuminated buttons, their quiet
voices and off-hand manner not quite concealing their deep concentration on
what they were doing. The station TV showed Eurydice begin its inching
withdrawal from the boosters. As the ship withdrew, it began slowly to rotate.
On the passengers' screen the station was already slipping off the edge, so
that they would have nothing to look at until it came on-screen an unguessable
number of minutes later. He had no idea how long the visual inspection would
take, and the crew were too busy for him to ask, so he switched the passenger
screen to the station signal so that they would have something interesting to
look at. Then he froze, looking guiltily at Prescott as he wondered whether he
was supposed to do things like that without first asking permission.
But Prescott merely nodded and continued with what he had been doing and
saying.
Almost imperceptibly, Eurydice withdrew from her boosters, like a bolt being
slowly unscrewed from an enormous truncated nut. First the bulge of the
passenger section twisted out, then the long cylinder directly behind it,
which housed the free-fall lounge and the water tank containing the reaction
mass for the nuclear engine, and finally the long, tapered cowling of the
reactor itself. As it drew clear, panels opened and retractable sensors and
focusing coils unfolded themselves, breaking up the clean outline.
The wall speaker cleared its throat, and the voice from Three said, "I've got
a telescope on you-it gives much better definition than the TV camera. But
what exactly am I looking for, fellows?"
The Captain looked at the First Officer without making any attempt to reply.
"Prescott. Nothing in particular, friend. It's just that I'm the worrying
type."
Mercer expected a sarcastic retort, but instead there was a long silence,
broken when the voice said, "You look good from here. Bob. I'll slip a filter
onto this thing and watch while you light your torch. But if you're going to
do something melodramatic with your " reactor, don't do it too close to the
station, huh?"
"Wouldn't dream of it," said Prescott.
On the station picture Eurydice drifted away from the boosters, spurting
bright balloons of fog as she lined up for the Jovian orbit insertion. Around
him, the crew were completing the attitude checks and the Captain was telling
the passengers to expect thrust in ten minutes. Mercer concentrated on his own
small, overly simple control panel, angling the remote-controlled TV camera on
the outer hull to give what he hoped would be a picture of the space-station
falling away when they began their burn. The close-up of the tail being
transmitted by Three at that time might be a little disconcerting to the
uninitiated.
Like himself, he thought drily.
A few seconds before Neilson pulled out his dampers, Mercer switched pictures;
then the couch was pushing him gently in the back, and Station Three began to
shrink away from the edges of the screen. The enormous structure diminished
steadily until it became a tiny, dazzlingly white insect enclosed by the
sunset terminator.
"Very artistic," said Prescott. "You'll spoil them if you aren't careful,
Mercer."
"A large part of my job," said Mercer stiffly, "is keeping the passengers
happy, and I was told that-" "And a small part of my job," Prescott broke in,
"is seeing that you do yours correctly. Now, what will be the next item
offered for their delight? More acrobatics?"
Mercer shook his head. "Rigging the cabin walls at this stage would interfere
with passenger visibility during the survival film, and that should wait until
after they've eaten and they begin to realize that they are really in space.
So first I introduce them to weightless eating and see that they don't make
too big a mess doing it."
"No," said Prescott sharply. "First you switch off the hull TV camera. Station
Three will shortly be out of sight, and a continuous picture of a receding
Earth might make someone homesick. Then you will announce lunch and then let
them get on with it. Ship's officers are supposed to remain aloof from the
passengers, Mercer, and running after them too much gives the impression that
you are little more than a steward. You are, but they must not be allowed to
know that. When we cut thrust in two hours from now -for a few minutes only,
to test the damper controls- the mess they will have made will be so obvious
that with luck they will feel too ashamed of themselves to risk the same kind
of mess again. Only then will you go down there-for the first and only
time-and clean up. But it would be much better for your image if you chivied
one or more passengers into doing it."
"That was how the last medic got himself fixed for the rest of the trip," said
MacArdle, laughing, "but then one housemaid wasn't enough for him and he
began-"
"Mercer," said Prescott, "what are you waiting for?"
Seething behind what he hoped was a poker face, Mercer killed the picture of
the beautiful crescent Earth and spoke to the passengers as he had been
directed.
He had known people like Prescott for most of his life -teachers and
professors and surgeons who had stomach ulcers or bad domestic trouble or who
had simply inherited a nasty disposition. There were only two ways to react to
people like that: Either ignore them and their continual jabbing until they
themselves got tired of doing it, or display a controlled reaction designed to
show them that they were not dealing with a sponge that soaked up everything
without protest.
"Four hours should be enough to let them eat and get to know each other,"
Prescott continued, "and not enough to allow arguments to start. You will
spend those four hours in your cabin, resting, after which you will see to the
tidying up and contrive to introduce the subject of safety and survival in
space. You will try to do this without scaring half the passengers to death."
"Just because I've spent most of my life studying for examinations," said
Mercer quietly, "doesn't mean I'm stupid."
"There is a difference," said Prescott, just as quietly, "between education
and intelligence."
"But I'm not tired," said Mercer, knowing that he was losing on this exchange
but not wanting to admit Prescott sighed. "If you don't go to your cabin," he
said, "we won't be able to talk about you behind your back."
As he climbed down to his cabin, very carefully despite the half-G thrust.
Mercer was not really surprised to hear Prescott talking to Neilson, with
occasional interjections from the Captain, or that the subject of the
conversation was far removed from the ship's medical officer. He opened and
closed the seals into his cabin, cutting off the sound of voices and feeling
like a child dismissed from a room where the conversation was too adult.
Unlike the other officers' cabins, which were fitted with more sophisticated
equipment occupying much less space. Mercer's did not give much room for him
to move. From the entry lock, the floor grill stretched ten feet to the curved
plastic canopy that ran from below his feet to what was nominally the ceiling
and gave, in the ship's present mode, a one hundred and eighty degree view of
the inside of the outer hull, complete with structural members and brightly
colored cable runs. The floor grill, which was just under three feet wide,
separated two vertical tiers of bunks, eight on one side and five on the
other. This was because the lowest one of the five was Mercer's, and he, being
the doctor, needed much more than the twelve inches, which divided the
patients' bunks.
A passenger unfortunate enough to come down with an infectious disease could
be isolated from the living quarters and other patients, because the bunks
were each fitted with an individual air supply and a hinged flap which sealed
in the patient. Mercer did not suffer from claustrophobia, but he thought that
any patient needing to spend more than a few days in one of those bunks would
have to be kept under heavy sedation if he wasn't to blow his organic
computer.
His own bunk did not have all that much elbowroom, of course, surrounded and
overhung as it was by communication and control panels and cupboards
containing medication. There was much more than he could ever expect to use,
even if a dozen epidemics swept the ship. But to take his mind off Prescott he
did a quick check of the medical supplies, then strapped himself into his
couch.
But not, he was sure, to sleep...
The buzzer had a low, insistent note that gradually increased in pitch until
he signaled that he was fully awake by switching it off. It was replaced by
the sound of the Captain's voice, which could not be switched off, ever.
"Mercer, you have been sleeping peacefully, if rather noisily, for the past
five and a half hours. During that time your passengers had their first meal
and did quite a lot of socializing, so there was no need to wake you. But now
the natives are growing restive. As soon as you've eaten go back and see that
the place is tidy, then set up for the survival lecture and film. We shall go
into cruising mode in just under four hours, so you have plenty of time."
"Yes, sir," said Mercer.
"We are required by law," the Captain went on, "to conduct three survival
drills as soon as possible after takeoff, even though nothing has ever gone
wrong or, considering the current fail-safe structural philosophies and the
multiplicity of back-up systems, is ever likely to. But you know all this. You
also know that, to keep the passengers from feeling nervous, the first drill
is treated as something of a joke-an amusing film followed by a light-hearted
question and, answer session.
"Don't frighten them. Mercer. But don't be too much of a comedian, either."
For a few seconds the Captain had sounded exactly like Prescott, Mercer
thought. Perhaps he was beginning to understand the reason why the medic
before him had tried to make so many friends among the passengers. Or was it
his predecessor's behavior with the passengers, which was the reason for
Prescott and the others treating him as they were doing? It was very hard to
know if it was the right or the wrong end of the stick, which was being used
to beat him.
He was still wondering about it when he returned to the passenger module. The
deck was not nearly as untidy as he had expected, nor had the litter been
widely scattered by the brief cessation of thrust. Mercer nodded politely to
anyone who waved, smiled, or otherwise noticed him as he headed for his couch.
He had already decided on the people who would volunteer for the clean-up
squad.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said, using the module's PA. "By
now you should have finished your first meal in space-no doubt with a few
accidental spillages here and there-and begun getting to know each other. You
will have plenty of time-four months, in fact-to finish getting to know each
other, but cleaning up the litter is much more urgent. That is why I would
like three of you to-" It was suddenly like a classroom full of eager pupils
with the answer to teacher's question. Mercer shook his head and went on, "I
knew. that you would all like to help, but to avoid offending anyone I shall
pick the three people closest to me, if they have no objections."
They hadn't. Mrs. Mathewson smiled and nodded.
Stone nodded without smiling, and Bobby Mathewson was trying desperately to
salute, with his arm tangled in webbing, his eyes almost as wide open as his
mouth with excitement. Mercer concentrated on the boy.
"We do not salute on this ship," he said gravely, "nor do you call anyone
'sir' except the Captain. Saluting spacemen appears only on television, so you
are Mathewson and I am Mercer. Got it?"
Treat a boy like a young man, his instructor had told him, and you won't go
far wrong.
Explaining the operation of the cleaners over and over again until he
understood it completely was something Mercer could do to the boy but not the
two adults. Repeating instructions to them might make them think that he
considered them stupid. But this way they would all be sure to get it right
without him running the risk of their taking offence. Finally he turned the
three of them loose, watched them at work for a few minutes, then returned to
his couch to call MacArdle to have the survival mm ready to run.
Prescott and Neilson climbed into sight a few minutes later and stood looking
around the passenger deck. Mercer went across to them in case they had
instructions for him.
Prescott stared at him without speaking. Neilson did not look at him, but
said, "I don't understand you.
Look at that blonde on couch Eighteen and the Asian on Twenty-three, and you
gave away the job to a man, a widow and . . . and her ten-year-old boy. You're
missing chances. Mercer."
He spoke softly so as not to be overheard by nearby passengers and without
moving his lips, just like a convict in an old-time prison film. Mercer tried
to copy the expression and intonation as he replied, "Maybe I prefer
ten-year-old boys."
Prescott laughed. It was a harsh, unrelaxed sound, probably because it was
produced by a mechanism stiff from disuse. Then they left Mercer and continued
their climb towards control.
Chapter V.
It was a beautifully made film, technically excellent and with a nice balance
of animation and actual footage-but it lacked accuracy. Not that it made any
deliberate misstatements; it was just that watching the antics of a cartoon
character did not give a true picture of a real person's physical and mental
capabilities.
A smiling young pseudo-spaceman who had cut his gleaming teeth on a great many
TV commercials began by introducing everyone to their ship, talking brightly
over performance and payload charts, design philosophy, and an animated
staging sequence. Then he began taking the ship apart, literally, into neat,
color-coded sections, magnifying each section and detailing its
function-control, officers' quarters, passenger lounge and cabins, weightless
lounge, reaction mass tank, and the eye-twisting detail of the reactor itself.
Mercer's sickbay/cabin looked ridiculously large for one man and thirteen
patients, while the quarters of the passengers were unbelievably spacious.
Mercer did not believe, and neither, after a few days, would the passengers.
"... And now," continued the smiling spaceman, hesitating as if to apologize
for wasting their time on non-essentials, "we come to the subject of survival
should an emergency arise. No such emergency has arisen in the past, nor,
considering the rigorous checks and inspections carried out before every
flight, is one ever likely to occur in the future. Nevertheless, we are
obliged by the regulations to explain our survival equipment and to give you
the chance to practice with it..."
Mercer had already seen the film many times and had listened to much more
detailed lectures on the subject.
His train of thought branched off onto a different, but nearly parallel,
track.
In his line of work human life had always been considered of paramount
importance-in theory, at least, a life was valued beyond price. But the cost
of protecting the lives of officers and passengers in a spaceship, where every
kilo hauled out of Earth's gravity represented enough coin of the
realm-anybody's realm-to make every person on the ship comfortably rich from
the cradle to the urn, was astronomical.
Naturally the price of the passengers' tickets did not defray even a small
fraction of the transport bill, much less the extra-weight penalties
represented by back-up systems and survival equipment. Those items were
conveniently lost in the even more complex systems of government bookkeeping
under headings like national prestige, technological spin-off, and assisting
the maximum utilization of technically trained manpower.
Human life seemed to grow more and more valuable the farther it was removed
from Earth. In space its value was incalculable; in the
five-hundred-and-one-thousand-seater transports flying between five and ten
miles above the surface it was high; but on surface transport systems the
powers that were did not seem to worry too much about lives, passing a few
laws about car safety belts, speed regulations and ship radar.
As a result, no fare-paying passenger had ever been lost in space, a few
hundred a year on average were cremated in metal birds which prematurely
stopped flying, and on the surface they mowed each other down with cars in
thousands every day.
Mercer had spent two years with an organteation, which processed road
accidents. That was how it referred to itself and the cases it admitted,
because far too few of them survived for it to call itself a hospital, which
cured people. He had grown up in-and was now, he realized, trying to flee-a
technologically advanced, ultra-fast and strangely bored society, whose
casualties had had the depersonalized, sexless sameness of so many mashed
flies. The drunken or drug-ridden or simply bored drivers and the careless or
absent-minded or innocent bystanders, when they were separated from the
machinery or the machinery was removed from them, could rarely be made
presentable by even the most conscientious of morticians.
Mercer's thoughts were taking a very morbid turn.
He had long ago discovered that there were no simple answers to complex
problems, and the best thing he could do right now was to give all his
attention to the survival film while trying not to look openly scornful of the
simple answers it was giving to what would be, if it ever occurred, an
extremely complex and lethal problem.
The spaceman with the teeth, the cap worn on the back of his head and
practically all of his uniform zips undone, was saying "... In the unlikely
event of such an emergency, the passengers and crew will probably have several
hours, or even days, to abandon ship-a process which can, if necessary, be
carried out safely and without undue fuss in a few minutes.
"The next stage," he went on, "deals with me mechanics of the abandon ship
sequence, showing the basic actions first and then repeating them with certain
variations..."
'On the screen, the distressed ship developed a faint red halo around its
reactor. The halo began to brighten and pulsate, but not quickly enough to
really frighten anyone. Further forward, the passenger section continued to
spin slowly as it furnished artificial gravity, while the rest of the ship
held steady. Then gradually it slowed as braking devices went into operation,
making the ship a rigid unit again in the pre-cruising mode.
The spinning passenger section had imparted its rotational inertia to the ship
as a whole, causing it to spin at half of its original speed.
Suddenly the ship emitted long white cylinders, which flung themselves away
from the spinning vessel, expanding into large globes as they went. Shortly
afterwards, four larger, wedge-shaped sections of the forward structure-the
modules containing each officer's cabin-broke away and followed the expanding
circle of passenger globes. The remains of the ship, looking warped and
lifeless, although not frighteningly so, shrank as the wedges and globes
radiated from the wreck and the screen took in a steadily expanding area of
space. Finally the ship disappeared. The survival pods applied thrust for a
few seconds and began the slow return to the recovery area, until they were
grouped like spherical sheep around the officers' segments, which had also
returned and were waiting for them.                                        .
On the second time around, the sequence went into greater detail regarding the
method of entry into the survival pod, its airlock, radio, two-shot thrust
motor, and other rather sparse appointments. The final treatment of the
sequence, which was too delightfully droll to cause anxiety to anyone, dealt
with methods of attitude control in a vehicle which was fitted with only one
short-duration and fixed-direction thruster....
"... Most of you are probably thinking by now that our survivors are being
given an awful lot to do," said the space-officer star as his face replaced
the image of the survival pods, "or that the globes should contain more
sophisticated equipment such as proper attitude control, navigation computers
and the like. But you must remember that your survival globe is little more
than a life-belt, and that a life-belt cannot be overloaded or it will sink.
Believe me, the equipment is adequate.
"It is adequate," he continued in a proud, solemn voice while he tapped his
temple very slowly with his right index finger, "because they will each be
carrying at least one computer of a type that has been tried and perfected
over a million years."
In control, MacArdlc brought up the lights and expertly faded out the
background music. Mercer stood up, swaying slightly in the low gravity, and
looked over his charges. Before he could speak, the passenger called Stone
tapped the side of his head and said solemnly, "He makes me feel proud, and
kinda sick."
Me too, thought Mercer. Aloud he said, "Any questions?"
"What I would like to know," said a passenger with Miss Moore stamped on her
identity patch, "is why we don't have officers like that on this ship? Why
don't you relax a little, sir? Can't you smile the way he did?"
"He probably can't," said Mrs. Mathewson, laughing, "because his teeth are
real and a bit uneven."
"His eyes look a bit uneven, too," Miss Moore said, "but they are a nice shade
of-"
"A trick of the light, m'am," said Mercer hastily, "caused by one slightly
thicker eyebrow. But I was inviting questions on survival in space."
"And I was asking one," she replied, looking him straight in the eye. "I was
wondering if you had any suggestions on how I can survive the boredom of
living for four months in a hermetically sealed can of space-going sardines. I
suppose some of the sardines will cooperate in relieving the boredom?"
Mercer nodded and said seriously, "Provision has been made for various forms
of individual and group competitions and entertainment. Nothing too strenuous,
of course, although it is advisable to take a certain amount of exercise every
day to avoid balance and blood pressure problems after we land.
"We have music tapes and films, most of which are fairly recent," Mercer
continued. "By that I mean that they have not yet been released for
television. There will also be instruction in weightless swimming and ballet,
which brings me back to the survival drills. Even though their usefulness is
arguable, the three sessions which we are obliged by regulations to stage can
be very interesting and often amusing."
The silence began to drag until Stone said, "What we really want to know is
what our beautifully-designed individual night plans say between the lines.
There isn't much space between the lines, of course, but if all the rumors
we've heard are true, it is very well filled. How about filling in a few of
them for us?"
Practically all of the passengers were watching Mercer and listening, or not
watching him and listening even harder. He nodded gravely and said, "There is
very little to add which is not already there. The rules are few and not at
all strict, so that you should be bound only by the dictates of common sense
and consideration for each other. You will be living in a restricted space,
sharing toilet and amusement facilities, and using cabins which give visual
privacy only. It is a good idea to put a little effort into liking instead of
disliking the people around you...."
"Love your neighbor?" asked someone.
"... Apart from this largely self-imposed discipline," Mercer went on, "there
are no rules so far as the passengers are concerned, and you will be left
pretty much to your own devices. But if some form of individual or group
activity proves harmful to the ship or other passengers, the person
responsible will be warned and if necessary restrained in sick bay-"
"A fate worse than death, I hope," said Miss Moore.
Mercer nodded. "If you call spending four months in a bunk the size and shape
of a coffin under partial sedation a fate worse than death, I'm inclined to
agree with you," he said, allowing his irritation with Miss Moore to show for
a moment. Mercer knew that he was not supposed to talk as bluntly as this to
passengers on the first day out, and that Prescott would probably skin him
alive for it. He forced himself to relax and went on, "But that kind of
trouble is unlikely to arise among a healthy, civilized group of people like
yourselves. This isn't flattery. You all know how thorough were the medical
and psych checks which you had to take before being allowed to book passage."
The trouble was, Mercer thought, that in this degenerate age the mental norms
had been stretched to fit some strange psych profiles. About all he really
could be sure of was that none of them were or had recently been on hard
drugs.
He continued, "With the exception of myself, the ship's officers have their
own specialist duties to perform and will intervene only if somebody starts a
riot or tries to kick a hole in the hull. A part of my job is to see that you
all adapt to shipboard life as quickly and easily as possible, to keep a check
on your health, and to instruct you in the use of such items as the swimming
facilities and, of course, the survival equipment. I shall not intrude on your
social activities even if invited to do so, and you are all free to do pretty
much as you please. Have you any questions?"
"About the survival film," he added.
Inevitably the Moore woman had a question, the same question with a slightly
different slant.
"How will the officers be able to survive the trip," she said, "with nothing
to amuse them but computers and textbooks? I realize that you are all highly
trained and disciplined supermen, but four months of self-imposed celibacy in
a space-going monastery cell ... I mean, is it necessary?"
Mercer was silent, thinking that the simple answer was that it was not
necessary, and that his predecessor's behavior was becoming much more
understandable to him. In Eurydice temptation was anything but subtle, if this
was the kind of question that could come up during the first day's flight. He
wondered what Miss Moore did in real life, and he was still wondering and
trying to think of a diplomatic reply when Mrs. Mathewson rescued him.
"Maybe our supermen are interested only in superwomen," she said.
Chapter VI.
The transition from powered to free flight occurred half an hour later. The
anti-nausea medication that he had administered just before takeoff was still
doing its job, so that the upsets were psychological and intrapersonal rather
than digestive. They came about as a direct result of the transfer of
passenger couches from the deck to what had been the walls of the compartment.
Mercer had demonstrated the safe, easy way of performing the operations-by
lying face down, held in position by the waist straps only, and allowing the
arms and legs to project over the edges of the couch to propel it along, check
its progress, or fend off other couch riders on collision courses. But in the
weightless condition the couches were too easy to move, and although they did
not weigh anything, their inertia was considerable. Set moving in the wrong
direction or pushed too hard, they could give a nearby passenger a very
painful nudge.
While they were being moved into their new position, Mercer had also to
exercise a great deal of discretion regarding who would be occupying adjoining
cabins-especially when four or five passengers insisted on adjoining a sixth
who did not wish to adjoin with them. Finally, he had to check that the
passengers had not positioned their couches across the line of a dividing
wall, or over a lighting fixture, or on top of a life-pod escape hatch.
At that stage he signaled control to begin spinning the passenger compartment,
and gradually the occupants began to stick with increasing firmness to their
new floor. The spin increased until centrifugal force pressed them against the
interior of the hull with an apparent gravity one half that of Earth normal.
Forward and aft of the passenger sections the compartments that were supposed
to remain weightless had begun to rotate in the opposite direction, and Mercer
could hear the regular thump of tangential thrusters checking the precession.
But none of the passengers seemed worried by the noise-they were too busy
laughing and waving at fellow passengers who were apparently standing on the
ceiling waving back at them.
Mercer waited for a few minutes to allow them to get used to the sensation,
then he made his way to the section of plating occupied by the Mathewsons and
asked if he could borrow Bobby. With the boy's help he began distributing the
plastic cabin dividers, demonstrating the method of attaching them to the
supporting lines so that they formed four taut, plastic walls and a
pull-across door-sheet which could be sealed from the inside. By the time he
had finished explaining how it was done to the last passenger, the first
cabins were complete and he was able to return Bobby to his mother. "He's
been a big help, m'am," he told Mrs. Mathewson, and he was not merely being
polite, "but the work has made him a little over-excited, I'm afraid, so I
suggest you give him the adult dose of sedative."
He knelt briefly beside her couch, pressed the release stud on a plate that
was set flush with the floor, and nipped it back, explaining that the cover
was simply for protection during the couch-moving operation and that the
recess contained a call-button, microphone and speaker which would enable her
to contact him in control or the sick bay if the need should arise.
"But right now I suggest that you take half' an hour getting used to the place
and preparing to turn m, he went on. "The cabin walls are opaque but
translucent, and we shall be switching off the main lighting m one hour from
now. If you want to read, the directional light on your couch will not
inconvenience anyone else trying to sleep."
"As for you," he said to the boy, "you can stand down. Don't forget to take
your medication. I shall probably need you again tomorrow and I don't want you
half asleep on your feet. Good-night, Mathewson.
"Good-night, Mercer," said the boy. His mother smiled and nodded.
In the next cabin he went through the same drill, and in the next. Some of the
faces registered, but others did not because he kept thinking about Mrs.
Mathewson and the difference a half-G had made to her face, easing the tension
lines and rounding out her features and figure. She had looked incredibly
young to have a son of ten years. He wondered suddenly if she had escaped from
more than just the gravity of Earth....
His last job before leaving for control was to stick name and number patches
to the cabin door-sheets and draw up a list of who was where.
It was quiet in the control room, and the expressions on the faces of its
occupants made it plain that they wanted it to stay that way. Mercer nodded to
Neilson and the Captain-the only two who bothered to look at him-and floated
into his couch. He clipped his list to the back of his left forearm and began
printing the passengers' names on self-adhesive cards, which he placed beside
the numbered lights on his call board. By the time he had finished the vision
pick-up showed the passenger compartment in darkness, and his fellow officers
were showing signs of breaking their vow of silence.
Beside each numbered call light was a switch which energized the cabin
microphones without, of course, acquainting the occupant of the fact He
brought m the Mathewson cabin first, listened briefly to heavy, adult
breathing which was too irregular for its owner to be asleep and a childish
whisper which was saying "... And God bless Mum and Dad and make him the same
every day...."
Quickly he flipped off the switch, realizing that Bobby had revealed an awful
lot about the Mathewsons in a very few seconds. At least on the ship they
would not be troubled by a man who was a different person practically every
day of the week.
The other switches brought in the sound of peaceful breathing, and one the
silence of an empty cabin. He checked the pickups in the heads, which were
also empty, and with visions of a passenger lost in the dark and blundering
through fragile cabin walls and waking everyone, he began thumbing the
switches, systematically searching for an incipient disturbance.
He did not find it. Instead he brought in a whispered conversation from a
supposedly single cabin, which he switched off hurriedly as it was reaching an
interesting stage.
"Spoilsport," said MacArdle.
"Sorry," said Mercer. He laughed, ridiculously pleased that someone had at
last decided to speak to him.
"There is no necessity for you to remain on duty, Mercer," said the Captain.
"Your handling of the passengers has been very good and your own behavior
excellent, so far. Why don't you get some extra sleep in your cabin while you
have the chance-you have a duplicate board there and the call buzzer is loud
enough to wake you should a passenger need attention."
They don't want me around, thought Mercer angrily.
Unlike Prescott, the Captain was being polite-even complimentary-in his
dismissal, but it was plain that Mercer was not one of the team and that they
did not want him hanging around. But all at once Mercer did not want to be
sent to bed like a small boy. He was going to be hanging around for the next
four months, at least, and the sooner they got used to the idea the better.
Besides, the Captain had not actually ordered him below.
He smiled and said, "Thank you, sir. It has been rather hectic down there, but
there are times when I find my own company a strain as well. So if you don't
mind, sir, I would like to stay for a while and enjoy the atmosphere of sanity
and peace."
They did not even look at him, and the silence lengthened, until finally
Neilson said drily, "It isn't peace. Mercer-more like a temporary cease-fire."
Prescott stirred on his couch, but it was the Captain who spoke. He sounded
polite and friendly and a little absentminded, as if an argumentative medic
was only one of his problems: "It is possible that you will grow exceedingly
tired of the control room and the people who inhabit it in the months to come,
Mercer," he said. "But you are welcome to stay here, of course, even if there
is nothing for you to do. Unless you would like to spend some of the time
telling me what you have planned for tomorrow? At one stage, after the cabin
construction period, you were apparently organizing card games. Why?"
"Yes, sir," said Mercer. "Two of the passengers seemed to be worried by the
survival film, and I changed the subject by telling them that weightless
swimming was available to everyone once the ship was in cruising mode. I
mentioned cards as being a fair way of deciding who would be the first two
people into the pool with me. I'm afraid two at a time is as many as I can
handle until I've had a little more experience myself."
"And the survival drill?"
"In the circumstances I thought of delaying them for a few days," said Mercer.
"Passenger nervousness can be catching, and my instructor told me that quite a
lot of latitude is allowed in the timing of these drills, and that the partial
dismantling of cabin walls can be irksome if the passengers are not already a
little bored and willing to play a new, if somewhat inconvenient, game.
"Or," Mercer went on, "I could take small groups of less nervous passengers
and give them survival instruction until most of them were proficient. That
way, the first full-scale drill would not be the shambles that the book says
it usually is."
He stopped because the Captain was shaking his head.
"I'm sorry. Mercer," he said firmly, "but I don't agree with that part of the
book. I think that I can trust you to carry out the exercise without creating
too much alarm among the passengers. The regulations state that survival
instruction be given to all passengers as soon as possible after takeoff, and
so far as I am concerned, 'as soon as possible' means just that."
Mercer nodded. Obviously Collingwood's conception of the space-going
priorities differed from those of the ground-bound, PR-minded type who
produced the copy for Mercer's manual.
"Later in the voyage," the Captain went on, "you may stage as many therapeutic
survival drills as you think fit, but the passengers must be made aware of the
survival procedures at the beginning, not close to the end, of the trip-"
"Eurydice ground control. Do you read?"
The Captain glanced at the speaker grill above his head and said, "Eurydice.
Go ahead."
"Your signal of 1476 this day querying pulsing and apparent temporary
misalignment of your C-Sixes during initial insertion. We have looked at this
and can see no cause for concern, especially as your instrumentation gives no
indication of malfunction. We don't see that you have a problem, Eurydice."
"We don't have a problem," replied the Captain with just a hint of irritation
in his tone, "but we would like an explanation for that few minutes of uneven
thrust and we think the answer lies in area C. We will be using the nuclear
propulsion system for standby heating only so we are not, repeat, not worried,
but-"
"Prescott would like an explanation, I understand."
Reception was too good for there to be any mistaking of the tone, which made
it all too plain that ground control knew Prescott of old and considered him
to be something of a fusspot. The Captain, Neilson and MacArdle were carefully
not looking at the First Officer while they tried to hide their embarrassment.
Prescott himself did not appear to be embarrassed or even uncomfortable, and
Mercer wondered if he was so sure his point of view was right that it just did
not matter what his fellow officers thought of him.
You already know, of course, that your C-Sixes eve sealed units which are very
thoroughly tested before assembly. If one of yours is sick, the only way we
can check on it is by turning up the maker's worksheets and inspection
paperwork. We will get on to that at once, and come back to you. Is there
anything else not bothering you, gentlemen?"
"Nothing else," said the Captain. "Eurydice out."
The silence lengthened, magnifying the tiny sounds made by the life-support
and power systems, until Prescott cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice
sounded firm and reasonable-perhaps, thought Mercer, this was the nearest that
the First Officer could come to apologizing.
He said, "Friend Neilson did not do a complete check of area C for the reasons
he has already given- acceptable reasons, to most First Officers. And even if
he had carried out the full inspection program, there is still no certainty
that the fault-if there is a fault- would have shown up. The chances are that
it would not show now even if it is there. But I would still like to have a
look-"
"You will stay here, Bob," said the Captain sharply, "while Neilson and I have
a look. We'll suit up and go through the passenger section and tank an hour
before they are due to waken, so as to avoid worrying them with the sight of
two officers in spacesuits. Once I discover the explanation for our initial
bumpy ride we shall not discuss it, or even mention it, for the rest of the
trip."
This time even Prescott was showing signs of embarrassment, and Mercer was
suddenly sorry for him.
As a doctor he disliked seeing anyone suffer.
"And Mercer," the Captain went on, "if I tell you too often, or with too much
emphasis, not to worry about the things you have just heard, you will probably
worry even harder. Let me just say that the problems you will have to face
with your passengers will be very much worse than anything that is likely to
crop up here. MacArdle, keep an eye and an ear on his panel.
You're relieved, Mercer. Good-night."
As he was returning to his cabin. Mercer felt sorry that he had not left
sooner. He had thought that they had been trying to exclude him because he was
an outsider, a non-member of their very exclusive club, while the truth was
that they had an aversion to the presence of a stranger at a family fight.
Chapter VII.
Mercer was still half asleep in his couch and squeezing food out of an
envelope when he heard the outer hatch open, followed by a polite knock on the
inner seal. A few seconds later it opened and Prescott floated in.
"Finish your breakfast and don't get up," he said. "I take it that you will
hold the first survival drill as soon as the passengers have eaten and tidied
up?"
Mercer nodded.
"Good. But I would like to make a suggestion, or if the polite phraseology
gives you the idea that you have some choice in the matter, consider it an
order. Demonstrating how to climb into a collapsed life-capsule with three
passengers at a time is warm work, so wear your shorts and check on the
position of the cabinet containing the bathing gear. You will enjoy a soak
afterwards, as well as getting in some practice in weightless swimming before
taking on your first two passengers."
"How do I explain wearing swimming shorts at breakfast time?"
"Your problem,'* said Prescott drily. "Who knows, some of them may enjoy the
sight of a splendid, half naked male animal."
"This male animal runs heavily to skin and bone..." began Mercer. But Prescott
was already closing the seal behind him.
By the time the passenger breakfast debris had been cleared away his rig had
raised a few eyebrows but no comment, and when he reached the stage of rolling
up the plastic walls and running the new film, Mercer had forgotten it
himself. Prescott ran the film twice-MacArdle being off duty-so that everyone
would know how to enter a collapsed life pod, how to do so quickly, and how to
help in any late arrivers, or passengers who had not quite got the idea, with
the minimum of wasted time and effort. Then Mercer went over the same ground
with a slightly different emphasis.
He began briskly: "We are having this drill today, and will probably have
another one tomorrow, because we must give at least three survival-instruction
sessions as soon as possible after takeoff. That is the only reason. I
apologize for the inconvenience it may cause some of you, but it does have its
compensations."
He nodded toward the camera pickup, and in control Prescott operated the
survival hatch actuators.
The covers sprang open, and Mercer went on: "The pods are positioned at equal
intervals around the waist of this compartment, and if you simply head for the
nearest one there should be no problem. As you saw in the mm, the first
passenger to enter simply jumps in. The inner seal opens inward and closes
automatically when pod pressure begins to build up before release. There is a
drop of about eight feet, but under half-G conditions this is no problem.
Below your feet there is a plastic bag containing lightweight screens and
other bits and pieces used for dividing the inflated pod.
Below that is the service module and food store.
"When the first passenger enters the pod," Mercer continued, "he or she will
drop until their feet touch the upper surface of the service module. In the
uninflated mode the pod walls are folded and the convolutions project inward,
so that there will not seem to be enough space for one, much less three
people. But these folds are resilient, and the first man in simply presses
himself backwards into them, then raises his hands to help the next passenger
into the pod."
"The second passenger in does not jump," he went on, "but instead sits on the
edge with his legs dangling inside and gripping the hatch coaming with both
hands, ready to lower himself inside when the first passenger pulls on his
legs. Once inside, the second passenger backs against the first and raises his
or her hands to assist the third passenger in the same way so that the three
of them fit neatly like a set of three stacked spoons." He cleared his throat.
"To begin with, I would like to demonstrate the drill with two volunteers. Mr.
Stone and Mrs. Mathewson, would you mind?"
They did not mind, and Mercer jumped in as Number One. Stone followed as Two
and got in without any trouble, but he did not press backwards against Mercer
firmly enough, so that Mrs. Mathewson found it a very tight squeeze. With much
wriggling and elbowing, her feet finally touched the floor of the pod, and a
murmur of applause went up from the watchers ringing the opening.
One of them asked seriously, "If there was a real emergency, how much time
would we have?"
"You would probably have several hours to get ready," Mercer said, trying to
keep the back of Stone's head out of his mouth, "but the drills are always
carried out on the assumption that the ship must be cleared within a few
minutes, otherwise nobody would ever take them seriously."
He heard a few of them laughing, then another leaned forward to ask, "Does the
rule about women and children first still hold in space?"
"No," said Mercer. "The reason for that rule at sea was largely because of the
shortage of lifeboats and the skilled manpower needed to launch them. We have
more than enough pod space to accommodate all our passengers, and launching is
automatic. And now, Mr. Stone, if you will help Mrs. Mathewson out again, we
can all get back on deck. I'm beginning to feel like an overdue triplet down
here."
That got another laugh, and there were no more questions about emergencies. He
suggested to Stone and Mrs. Mathewson that they go in first with two other
passengers each, all of whom would in turn instruct others until everyone had
experience of at least one climb into a pod.
"Leave them to fend for themselves," said Prescott suddenly in his earpiece.
"I'll keep an eye on them from here while you go aft. Neilson wants you in
E-Three, that's the compartment on the other side of the tank. The Captain has
a metal splinter in his arm, with complications. Grab your kit and take a look
at him."
Mercer licked his lips and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'll have to leave you
for a few minutes. Just carry on with the practice; you are doing fine."
He did not hurry toward his cabin while he was in sight of the passengers, but
made up for lost time when he was not. Within a few minutes he was at the
entrance to the tank. From a nearby cabinet he pulled out a mask, visor and
air-tank and slipped them on, then stopped.
With an injured arm, the Captain would not want to put on his spacesuit again
to come through the tank, so he would need swimming gear, too. And he had said
yesterday that he did not want to risk worrying the passengers by letting them
see Neilson and himself wearing spacesuits. It might be better to bring along
two sets of gear....
"Mercer, hurry it up!" snapped Prescott "Just leaving."
The tank lock was big enough to take three people at a pinch, he noted. In the
tank itself he fumbled around until he found the light switch and was
immediately blinded.
The tank was two-thirds full of the water, which the nuclear propulsion system
used as reaction mass, and because the ship was in free fall, it had not
remained in the lower end of the tank when thrust had ceased.
Instead it had spread- to fill the whole tank with a glittering froth of
bubbles, air pockets and irregular masses of water. It was impossible to see
for more than a few yards into the stuff, and it would be very easy to lose
orientation. For a few seconds Mercer considered swimming to the wall and
pulling himself along the handgrips which projected from it, but that would
take time. On the other hand, if he simply kicked hard against the bulkhead
behind him and swam, he should reach the other end fairly quickly even if he
did not know exactly where he was on the way. The tank was only sixty feet
long.
As it happened the trip was far too short, giving him no chance to really
appreciate the exquisite sensation of burrowing through clouds of bubbles and
of being slapped and buffeted by air pockets and solid clumps of water. He
almost forgot the Captain.
"How is it going, Mercer?" said Prescott.
"I'm cycling the aft tank lock now. Everything is fine. The water is nice and
warm."
"It shouldn't be."
Mercer had no time to wonder about the warm water because the outer seal had
opened and he was looking at his patient.
Both men had their helmets and back packs removed. Neilson was holding the
Captain's shoulders, and Collingwood was gripping his right upper arm, where
smears of blood were visible above and below his fingers. The complication
Prescott had mentioned was that the splinter had entered the Captain's arm
while he was outside, and he had suffered a fairly serious
decompression-judging by the condition of his eyes and the evidence of
bleeding from his nose and ears-before the engineer had pulled him back
inside.
Mercer pushed the magnetic studs of his kit against the deck and flipped open
the lid.
It rattled at him.
He pulled the radiation counter from its clip and swung around. "You're hot,
for God's sake! Both of you. Get out of those suits!"
"Mercer, what's happening?"
Before trying to answer Prescott, Mercer took a few minutes to run over the
men with his counter-without actually touching them or their suits. The
thought of that invisible sleet of radiation going through his unprotected
body was enough, without adding the danger of surface contamination. He wanted
badly to dive back into the tank and put as much distance between the two
poisonously hot officers and himself as the dimensions of the ship would
allow.
"Both men have been splattered with radioactive material," said Mercer. He
cleared his throat because his voice had sounded an octave too high, then went
on, "Neilson is shocked but does not seem to be physically damaged; the
Captain's suit was punctured and he suffered a rapid but not explosive
decompression. There is bleeding from the ears and nose, some boil-off from
the tear ducts, some lung damage, too, judging by his difficulty in
breathing-"
"Captain, what happened?"
"He probably can't hear you," said Mercer, but surely the answer can wait. We
have to get them out of the suits fast. The radioactive material must be
adhering very loosely to the suit fabric. It could come loose and drift about
waiting for us to breathe it in-we may already have breathed it in. Can you
come down here? I need help."
"You're right, the answers can wait," Prescott replied calmly. "And sorry, I
can't help you nor can MacArdle-our power instrumentation is beginning to look
very sick and we'll be busy for a while. Neilson, do a fast undress of the
Captain and yourself. It means ruining the suits, but nobody will be able to
wear them for about fifty years anyway. Move, and do exactly as the Doctor
orders."
Mercer looked at Neilson, who still seemed dazed, and said clearly, "Strip off
your spacesuits, coveralls, everything, as quickly as possible. Try not to
contaminate the skin while taking them off. Have you got that? Then put on the
air-tanks, breathing masks and shorts. Inside the tank try to create as much
turbulence as possible with your hands and feet to wash off any hot stuff that
may have stuck to your skin..."
He broke off, wondering why he had thought it necessary to mention the shorts
at a time like this. Was he hoping that this sudden emergency might not be as
serious as it seemed, that the ship's supermen would cure their vessel's ills
while he performed the same service for its Captain, and that in a few days'
time the problem would have shrunk to lesser importance than that of allowing
two ship's officers to appear before the passengers minus their shorts? Was
he, in fact, trying hard to reassure himself? The answer was a very definite
"yes."
Neilson was performing a weightless adagio dance with the Captain as he began
withdrawing Collingwood from his suit. Mercer went forward to help, but
stopped when the engineer said sharply, "Don't touch!
I have gauntlets and you haven't. This won't take long -be ready with his
breathing gear."
When Neilson pushed the Captain towards him, Mercer put his mouth close to
Collingwood's ear and said loudly, "I'm dressing you for the tank, sir.
You can spend a few minutes getting used to the breathing mask before we go
in. Try not to cough." By the time he had slapped a temporary patch on the arm
wound Neilson was crowding into the lock behind them, carrying a large,
cylindrical case with a handle on it.
"You take this. Mercer," he said, pulling up his mask to speak. "You'll need
it later. I'll take care of the Captain."
But the Captain was trying to take care of himself, even though his eyes were
still squeezed shut and blood continued to leak from his nose and ears,
kicking out with his feet and moving the water around his body with his good
hand. When they went through to the passenger section he was even able to
walk. He looked a bit unsteady, but no more so than the passengers, who were
experiencing their second day in weightless conditions. Neilson, without being
too obtrusive about it, was guiding the Captain while pretending to fuss with
his air tank. Mercer had plugged the Captain's ears and nose with cotton when
they came out of the tank and had left the visor in place instead of pushing
it onto his forehead, and the condensation on the inside of the glass hid his
eyes from the passengers.
"Both of you go to my cabin," he told Neilson quietly. "Put the Captain in
bunk Three, it's shielded, and stay there yourself. Don't risk contaminating
the control room until I've checked you again. I'll be with you in a few
minutes."
He stopped then and looked at the passengers around and above him. Their
clothing was disheveled, their hair mussed, their faces red, and most of them
were smiling. With an effort. Mercer made his face do the same, but before he
could speak there was an interruption.
"I would like a swim," said Miss Moore loudly. She looked much more mussed
than any of the others, but seemed quite happy about it as she went on, "You
promised us a swim today, and you three have been in-"
"Yes, m'am," said Mercer quickly. "These two officers are the Captain and the
Engineer. Rank has its privileges, and the survival drills must come first.
But right now I suggest that you replace the-" "Negative, Mercer, negative,"
said Prescott sharply. "For the time being I want the pod hatches open and the
cabin dividers out of the way. Do you understand?"
Some sort of accident aft, warm water in the tank when it should not have been
warm, the engineering instrumentation looking sick, and the passenger
compartment to remain ready for evacuation. Mercer understood.
He held his smile in place and went on, "I mean, of course, resume the drill.
You all know what to do now. Just try to do it a little faster. Try hard."
"If we tried it two at a time," said one of the men, "It might be easier to
get the hang of it."
"Three to a pod," said Mercer firmly. "The third passenger is a necessary
requirement, to act as chaperone."
They were still laughing as he hurried after the Captain and Neilson. Mercer
wanted to tell them to stop laughing, and to tell them the reason why they
should stop laughing and instead start learning to survive as fast as they
could. But the rules did not allow that.
Terminal cases were never told they were going to die until, or unless, all
hope was gone.
Chapter VIII.
In the sick bay, Neilson insisted that Mercer dress properly before he touched
either of his patients; he quickly opened the container which the doctor was
still carrying and began helping him into the anti-radiation garb which it
held-loose pants that came up to his armpits, a combination hood and cape,
elbow-length gauntlets, and heavy periscopic goggles. The material was
flexible but heavily leaded. In free fall conditions the weight did not
matter, but the inertia made it difficult to initiate a rapid movement and
just as hard to stop it.
Neilson told him that the rig was used while checking hot sections of the
reactor in areas that were pressurized. Mercer thought that he had felt cooler
quite a few turkish baths, but the feeling of protection which the rig gave
him more than outweighed that disadvantage.
The Captain was the more serious case of the two, and Mercer felt guilty about
treating the engineer first.
But with luck Neilson would need only simple medication-something to steady
him without making him sleepy-to be fit for duty, while Mercer did not at the
moment know what, if anything, he could do for the Captain. So he went over
Neilson with his radiation counter, square inch by square inch, so intently
that when Prescott's voice sounded in his earpiece he nearly lost the counter.
"Can I have the Captain and Neilson back, Mercer?"
"Neilson is clean and fit for duty," Mercer replied, "but the Captain is a
more complicated case-Neilson will tell you about him when he sees you-and
will need a longer examination." He hesitated for a moment, wanting an answer
but not trusting himself to ask the question in case his fear would show, then
went on, "How much time am I likely to have?"
Prescott also hesitated, and Mercer could imagine him trying to decide whether
to be reassuring or truthful. Finally he spoke: "The way it looks now. Mercer,
nothing sudden or dramatic is likely to happen for at least another hour,
perhaps two. If the situation changes, you will be the first to know."
Mercer thought that the First Officer had sounded both truthful and
reassuring, which in the present circumstances was quite a trick. He turned,
stuck his medical kit at a convenient height, and strapped his feet securely
to the floor grill beside the Captain's bunk.
He had to begin by treating the symptoms rather than the multiple ailments in
order to make the Captain as comfortable as possible before the curative
treatment could begin-always supposing that a cure was possible with
non-specialized instruments and medication while operating in weightless
conditions for the first time. Speaking loudly but reassuringly, he managed to
get Collingwood to relax his eyelids and then open his eyes. Mercer did not
like what he saw, and the Captain, of course, could see nothing.
"Your eyes are swollen as a result of the decompression, sir," Mercer said
clearly, putting his face as close to the Captain's ear as the leaded hood and
goggles would allow. "You can't see at the moment and will not be able to do
so until the incidental damage in the area has had a chance to repair itself.
"I'm going to apply some cream which will make your eyes more comfortable and
aid the healing," Mercer went on, "then I want you to shut them and keep them
shut for a few days to give it a chance to work. I shall probably have to
repeat the application until you have specialist attention. But now I'm going
to pad and lightly bandage your eyes, mostly to remind you not to use them."
He attended to the damaged ear-drums next, saying that no doubt MacArdle would
be able to modify one of the intercom earpieces to serve as a hearing aid for
the remainder of the voyage. Then he checked for bladder and anal damage,
leaving the lungs-where the major damage was most likely to have
occurred-until last.
By then Collingwood was not a prepossessing sight.
The minor blood vessels lying just under the skin in areas where his spacesuit
had not been a close fit had distended or ruptured due to the decompression.
The Captain looked as though a gang of professional thugs had worked him over
or he had been the victim of a tattooist gone mad.
"Would you mind coughing into this, sir?" said Mercer, after he had sounded
the lungs with his stethoscope. He was beginning to get used to the idea of
rotating his weightless patient instead of moving around himself.
"I've been trying not to cough for hours," said the Captain.
"Now you have permission, sir. And spit, too, if you can."
Mercer examined the results, feeling glad that the Captain could not see them.
Aloud, he said, "There is some evidence of lung damage-not unexpected, but it
could have been very much worse. You must have expelled most of the air from
your lungs as soon as you realized that your suit had been pierced."
"Yes, Doctor-screaming bloody murder. It hurt me. It still hurts me."
"I'm sorry about that, sir," Mercer replied, "but I had to be sure that your
heart and lungs were in shape to take a general anesthetic if one was
necessary. As things are, a local will do fine. In a few minutes you won't
even know that you have an arm, much less one with a hole in it."
While the injection was taking hold, Mercer strapped the Captain firmly into
his bunk, tying down his legs, arms and waist, but so as not to constrict his
chest. With the radiation counter keeping a raucous accompaniment, he began to
probe the wound.
An hour later He was still probing, and two tiny specks of radioactive metal
were wasting their energies on the walls of a lead container, when the cabin
speaker came to life with a voice that Mercer did not recognize at first. But
then he realized that it was the strange sound of Prescott being polite.
"Ladies and gentlemen, the survival-drill period is now at an end. If you will
kindly stand clear of the pod hatches I shall close them and allow you to
replace your cabin dividers and have lunch. Thank you."
Prescott did not have a personal message for Mercer -obviously he was supposed
to read between the lines of the P.A. announcement, which made it clear that
the ship was not nearly as sick as had been thought at first.
He treated and dressed the arm wound, which was now clear of contaminated
metal. But the radiation counter still did not sound happy, and he soon found
out why.
There were two other points of emission, separated by a little more than three
inches, deep in the right lung. Probably he had inhaled them while Neilson was
pulling him out of his spacesuit; or one of the pieces could have been carried
from the site of the arm wound through the subclavian vein and superior vena
cava, heart, and pulmonary artery, doing a fair amount of damage every inch of
the journey. Now they lay like two tiny incendiary bombs, slowly burning the
life out of the surrounding tissue and killing off red corpuscles by the
hundreds.
With the medical facilities available in the ship. Mercer could not remove
them-more accurately, with his relatively crude radiation counter he could not
pinpoint their position close enough to dig for them without killing the
patient. And if he did not remove them, they would kill him anyway in a matter
of time. Mercer did not know whether the available time would stretch beyond
the scheduled end of the trip or if he would have to request Prescott to abort
and head for home.
If this sort of situation arose at sea, it was a simple matter to return to
port or whistle up a chopper with a medical crew on board and transfer the
casualty to a shore hospital. But Eurydice was using the orbital speed of
Earth and the gravity of the Sun to help speed her on her way, and she might
not carry enough reaction mass to kill her present velocity, build up enough
speed for a fast return, and then kill that velocity, too.
Only Prescott could give him those answers, and the first thing he would want
to know was the time available for the Captain. By keeping the patient under
close observation for a few days and checking on the cumulative effects of the
radiation. Mercer thought that he could probably make a rough estimate, but he
would also have to make allowances for the effect of the decompression damage
and any psychological factors that might aid or retard recovery.
Physically, Collingwood was in very good shape, and psychologically, well.
Mercer remembered the hostess who had ridden with him in the coach to the
launching pad-the smiling, generous, beautiful girl who was the Captain's
wife-and decided that there would be no problems with the patient about not
wanting to live.
While he was still thinking about the Captain's wife and remembering how she
had asked him to look after her husband and everyone else, Mercer administered
a sedative shot and, after some hesitation, a three-day PC which would render
the patient less excitable, more fatalistic, and willing to accept suffering
without, complaint. He waited until the Captain was asleep, then closed his
bunk and slid it into its recess. After that he took off and stowed away his
protective clothing and changed into his uniform, carefully checking the zips
and the angle of his cap.
The ship might have been ready to blow up a few hours earlier, but somehow he
did not think that this would be an acceptable excuse to Prescott for
sloppiness of dress. Before leaving the cabin he switched over the bunk mike
so that he would be able to monitor the Captain's breathing from his position
in control.
Prescott gave him a few minutes to settle into position, turn up the gain on
the Captain's monitor, and check on the passengers through the vision pickup.
Most of them were in their cabins, but there was a small group aft watching
the antics of two girls who were flapping their arms and pretending to be
birds in the weightless section between the passenger compartment and the
tank. The mikes brought only the sounds of the two human seagulls and amused
noises from the watchers.
"We heard you talking to the Captain," said Prescott finally. "It sounded
encouraging. Is he going to be all right?"
"He isn't fit for duty and won't be for the rest of this trip," said Mercer
carefully. "As for being all right, that depends very largely on the health of
the ship. How is your patient?"
Prescott looked at him sharply, then said, "At present we have two additional
options to that of abandoning ship. The first is that we proceed as originally
planned. This will necessitate testing the nuclear reactor briefly to make
sure that it will work properly during deceleration at the other end. This
additional spurt will mean minor course corrections and will eat into our
safety reserve of reaction mass, but not significantly. The second option is
to abort the trip and head for home as quickly as possible. This will leave us
with no reserves at all.
"So you can see that the ship is very sick but should survive, barring
complications," Prescott ended. "How does this affect the health of your
patient?"
Mercer briefly described Collingwood's condition, the treatment and medication
he had been able to give, and explained the difficulty of giving an accurate
prognosis until he had a chance to observe his patient over a longer period.
He went on, "I have no idea of the intensity or duration of the radiation that
he was exposed to at the time of the explosion which punctured his suit-"
"It wasn't an explosion, Doctor," said Neilson suddenly. "Think of holding a
pencil in each hand and pressing the unsharpened ends together, hard. So long
as the pressure is directed evenly along the axes of the pencils, nothing
happens, but the slightest lateral pressure can result in broken knuckles.
When the Captain began removing the control-rod retaining sleeve... Well, he
said that we were to stay off the suit-to-ship frequency because he did not
expect to find trouble, and he was afraid that not finding it would make me
say something, which might embarrass Prescott. When it happened I didn't even
remember the radio until we were inside, and then I did not know how serious
it was until you started yelling that we were hot...."
"This isn't an official enquiry, Neilson," Prescott broke in. "I have already
tried to tell you that the blame for this mishap lies with the final assembly
and inspection people-they fitted six perfect actuator rods, except that one
of them was the wrong size. I doubt if even pre-launch inspection would have
caught that one -they look for the minor errors, the tiny ones which can
sometimes slip past the inspectors farther up the line, not major structural
blunders like this. You stood very little chance of spotting it even if you
had suspected that something was wrong, and as you well know, my earlier
displeasure with you was caused by your not properly inspecting an entirely
different system, which has not given any trouble.
"If there is an official enquiry," Prescott went on, "you will be commended by
me for your fast rescue of an EVA decompression case. So stop craving
absolution for someone else's sin, concentrate on your board, and shut up. Go
ahead. Doctor."
Mercer nodded. He was beginning to realize that Prescott was a fair
rule-of-thumb psychologist, even if his thumb was somewhat calloused. Neilson
had obviously been feeling guilty about the accident, and now the only person
who might still have thought him responsible-Mercer himself-knew otherwise.
The final blast was just a reminder, also reassuring in the present
circumstances, of who was boss and the bearer of the ultimate responsibility.
"If the trip proceeds normally," Mercer resumed, "he might not survive it if
the radiation was intense, or he may survive with a rapidly developing
leukemia, which will need frequent transfusions to keep him alive. No doubt
there will be donors of the right blood type among the passengers, but while
those two fragments of metal remain in his lung-" "There is no chance at all
of digging them out?"
"They are tiny," said Mercer. "It would be like spooning out strawberry jam to
find two specific pips."
"Please," said MacArdle, looking slightly sick.
"We don't carry the specialized equipment needed to treat him," Mercer said
seriously, "and his condition is grave enough to warrant turning back, if you
have the reaction mass to-do so."
"We have," said Prescott, "and we will."
Mercer could not hide his relief, even though a fair proportion of it was for
his patient. He said, "Not a direct return and landing, sir. Reentry
deceleration might kUl him, and if he did survive it, recovery would be much
slower in a surface hospital. Station Three have all the facilities in their
advanced medicine section to put him right."
"Station Three," said Prescott drily, "can cure my patient, too."
Chapter IX.
"Eurydice control. Do you read?"
Mercer had his ears on the Captain's respiration and his eyes on the passenger
vision pickup, which showed a fair amount of socializing going on in the
module and two couples dancing-mixed wrestling might have been a better
description-in the weightless section forward of the tank. He did not pay much
attention to the exchanges between Prescott and Eurydice ground control -they
were too technical for him in any case-until the acid tones of the First
Officer became noticeably more caustic.
"... A combination of minor oversights, none of which would have been
individually troublesome," Prescott was saying. "Next thing you'll tell me
that they could have happened to anybody."
"The man will be fired, of course, with the others who missed his slip-up. But
it was basically a clerical error, and he was under stress at the time. A
domestic problem was worrying him, his wife was expecting their first-"
"I hope," said Prescott savagely, "that she bore him a litter of lizards. But
I'm more concerned with effects right now. Just as soon as possible we shall
apply full thrust. But first, before we swap ends to decelerate, I must know
if the nuclear propulsion system is safe. The accident knocked out most of our
sensory circuits in that area and, although the remaining instrumentation
gives a confused but not exactly dangerous picture, I'm worried about that
slight rise in temperature reported in the water tank."
"I'm not questioning your decisions, Prescott, but m aren't you over-reacting
to all this? The chances are that you will have no further trouble and that
the damage is easily reparable. Maybe the Captain's condition is not quite so
serious as you think, and in the heat of the moment Mercer may have mistaken
the temperature of the tank water and-"
"Unlikely," said Prescott. "There have been a few hot moments since and he
hasn't-"
"Very well, Prescott, carry out your abort. We'll allow you half an hour to
swap ends-no point in wasting time if you are set on doing it-and give you the
numbers for full deceleration and insertion into the return orbit. Do you
still want the recovery ship team on standby?"
"Don't ask stupid questions."
"Very well. Eurydice control out."
Prescott took a deep breath and turned to Mercer.
"You may have thought that I was about to compliment you back there. Don't set
too much store by that-I just can't abide outsiders criticizing one of the
family, even a new, untrained, foundling member like you.
"But I've a job for you," he went on. "Go back and recheck the tank
temperature. You'll find insulated bottles in the bulkhead locker beside the
outer seal. Take one. You will see that it has a snap fastening at the neck,
that it is double-walled, and that there is a thermometer and a yellow disc,
which changes color in certain circumstances, between the walls.
"Go into the lock chamber," he continued. "No need to go into the tank itself
at this stage until we have some idea of how much radioactive contamination
you left behind after your first bath. Open one of the inner valves, which are
plainly labeled with operating instructions, and press the neck of your bottle
against the outlet and keep it there until it is nearly full. In free fall the
water will not pour out, so you may have to wait a few minutes for it to
fill...."
"I should do this," said Neilson suddenly. "After all, I'm still dressed for
the job."
"Don't think I haven't noticed," said Prescott sourly.
"Pull up your shorts, dammit. I have enough problems on this ship without
having my sensibilities blasted by the sight of your hairy navel. And I don't
want you or your eyes to leave that board. MacArdle will monitor the Captain's
breathing and watch your board, Mercer, so move."
As he would not have to go into the tank itself, Mercer did not bother to
change, but he put on a purposeful expression and pretended not to notice the
passengers who spoke to him on the way. The weightless dancers were not
noticing anyone but each other. He found an insulated bottle and entered the
chamber quickly, pressed the mouth against the outlet and began turning the
valve.
The metal felt very warm.
Suddenly the bottle thumped against the palm of his hand. He stared at it
stupidly, realizing that it was already full and that it should not have
filled so quickly.
As he withdrew and sealed the bottle, steam and scalding gobbets of water
spurted from the outlet, filling the chamber with a hot, blinding fog. Mercer
let go of the bottle, wrapped his hand in his cap and twisted shut the outlet
valve, while with his other hand he groped for the evacuation button. He heard
the combination suction pump and air blower-the only means of rapidly emptying
a compartment full of weightless water-making rude, gurgling sounds.
But the chamber did not clear completely--steam and a fine spray of scalding
droplets were spurting from the edges of the inner seal. Mercer retrieved his
cap and test bottle, whose thermometer showed a temperature close to boiling
point and a disc, which had turned from yellow to muddy brown. He felt like a
half-boiled lobster with an icy cold lump of fear in its belly. Even though he
did not know what exactly was happening, he did know that it was deadly
serious and (hat he had to get back to Prescott fast.
The passengers outside had other ideas, however.
As soon as he came out they surrounded him, laughing and trying to grab him.
"There's a black crow among the lovebirds," said one of the men. "A wet, black
crow."
"That isn't fair," said one of the girls. "You promised us a swim, and now
you've had two and-" "With your clothes on!" added the other girl, who had
succeeded in grabbing his ankle.
He wanted to yell at her to let go or he would kick her pretty, laughing face
that he had no time for horseplay at a time like this. But instead he said,
"No m'am, space-washing. I dump my wet uniform in a lock, open it to space and
the moisture boils off. It takes out the wrinkles, too. Excuse me, I mustn't
catch cold..."
When he entered the control room a few minutes later, Prescott, with one hand
gripping the engineer's headrest, was hovering over Neilson's board. He said,
"Mercer, you do not launder your uniform in that incredible fashion, unless
you don't mind ice crystals in your underpants-and your ability to lie
convincingly under pressure worries me...."
He broke off as he saw Mercer's face, then put out his free hand for the
bottle.
"It's hot," said Mercer.
Prescott's features went stiff. "In both senses of the word." He handed it to
Neilson and added, "Well?"
The engineer took one look, then said very calmly, "This damn board is half
dead and the rest of it is sick.
Getting no response at all from the sensors usually means a complete power
cut-off or a simple circuit failure. This tells me that it is circuit failure;
probably the cable looms are melted through, and the amount of heat conducted
through the stem to the tank tells me that we have a reactor meltdown
situation. At the moment the dampers are in just far enough to give power for
lighting and life-support, but they aren't locked, and now I can't lock them.
When the rod actuators melt they will pop out and the reactor will go
critical."
"Have you enough power," said Prescott, "to engage with the passenger module?"
Neilson nodded.
"Then do that."
Prescott swung himself into his couch as the control room began gradually to
share the spin and apparent gravity of the passenger section. He unclipped the
public address mike, paused for a moment, then said calmly, "Attention, ladies
and gentlemen. Please stand clear of the survival pod hatches; they will open
in five seconds. This is not a drill. We are preparing to abandon ship."
It sounded too frighteningly final. Too much was happening too quickly, and
Mercer desperately wanted to go back in time, if only for a few minutes, to
give himself a chance to assimilate it. Inanely, he said, "When I was in the
tank chamber the inner seal looked as if it might-" There was a loud thump,
and the edge of the door he was gripping jerked under his hand. On the
passenger view-screen he could see steam filling the passage leading to the
tank.
"It just has," said Prescott, "but the outer seal is much stronger and should
hold for a while. See what you can do for your passengers."
Mercer had trouble negotiating the normally weightless passage to the
passenger compartment because the gravity-free forward and stern sections were
now sharing the rotation of the central module. This was necessary if the four
big, widely-curving supports, which carried the power and control links fore
and aft as well as allowing the passenger section to rotate independently of
the rest of the ship, were not to snag the life pods on their way out. The
effect on Mercer in that narrow passage was that his feet were pulling
one-eighth G while his head and chest were weightless, and Coriolus force was
giving him an extra twist just for luck. But Prescott was not allowing time
for anyone to think, much less feel confused.
"Attention ladies and gentlemen. The survival pod hatches are now open. Please
board three to a pod in a brisk but orderly manner, just as you did during the
drill. The hatches will be sealed prior to pod ejection in five minutes."
Mercer was in the passenger section by then, furiously running over in his
head the emergency instructions which he had memorized only hours earlier. He
added loudly, "Don't forget to leave behind all personal effects which are
metal or have sharp edges, such as manicure scissors, jewelry with large
stones, or anything which might puncture the fabric of the survival pod. Don't
worry about losing them-you will be fully compensated for their actual or
sentimental value with no quibbling. ..."
Which was a stupid thing to say at a time like this, thought Mercer. It had
just popped out without thinking, and he could just imagine what Prescott
would have to say about it. Unless, of course, his subconscious had been
working even if the rest of his mind had not, and it had decided that
appearing to worry over trifles at a time when all hell was breaking loose was
also an effective means of giving reassurance.
But suddenly all such subtle methods of reassurance became superfluous as the
outer seal of the tank began to give. Steam billowed into the passenger
module, cutting visibility to a few yards, while a high-pitched whistle made
it just as difficult to hear. Mercer leaned toward the nearest couch mike.
"Control, give me maximum lighting, please."
Someone screamed as the lights went up to full strength, probably thinking
that there had been an explosion. As a result, the passengers who had been
standing around, too stunned by events to move, began piling into the pods.
The process was not orderly but it was fast. He stumbled into three of them
who were trying to get into a pod at the same time, dragged two of them
back-no effort in quarter-G conditions-and fed them in at five second
intervals. A few yards farther on there was a woman rolling up the cabin
dividers.
"We won't be using them again, m'am," he shouted.
"Get in your pod."
He continued from pod to pod, not wasting time on words when a good hard push
would serve instead, but usually finding that the heads and shoulders were
disappearing with satisfactory rapidity.
"Anyone who hasn't found a place?" he called.
"Speak up, please."
"Bobby! Where's Bobby...?"
He glimpsed a moving shape in the fog and went after it. The extra lighting
was making the thickening clouds of steam more dazzlingly opaque now and not
helping visibility at all. He gripped Mrs. Mathewson by the arm and pulled her
toward the nearest hatch opening.
"Have you room for one more?"
"No, full up." replied a voice from inside.
Mercer swore, not believing it. Still gripping Mrs. Mathewson, he knelt down
and reached into the pod with his free hand. He felt the tops of four heads.
They certainly were full up.
"Mercer, hurry."
He ignored Prescott's voice in the earpiece and that of the distraught girl on
the other side as he moved to the next pod and repeated the question. The
white blur of a face appeared, then a pair of hands.
"Listen, m'am," he said as gently as he could while shouting. "Bobby is safe.
People feel very protective towards children, and he was probably first into
someone's pod minutes ago. So just . . . No, leave go of my neck. He'll be all
right, I promise you..."
He was holding her by the armpits over the open pod, and a pair of hands were
trying to pull her in.
Suddenly he kissed her steam- and tear-streaked face.
She was so startled that she lost her grip on his neck and disappeared into
the pod.
I've been doing a lot of things without thinking today, he thought, and they
all seem to turn out right.
But just then he badly wanted to dive into the nearest pod, kick and claw his
way to the bottom no matter how many other people were in it, and wait until
Prescott flung them clear. The whistle of escaping steam had taken on a
deeper, burbling tone, which probably meant that the seal was ready to give
and there would be a major steam explosion at any moment. And as he moved from
pod to pod, shouting for anyone who had not found a place to call out, he
found himself splashing through half an inch of near-boiling water.
The hatch lips were only an inch above deck level.
The fog was unpleasantly hot and it was difficult to breathe. He filled his
lungs carefully, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "Is everyone
aboard the pods?"
From somewhere in the fog a voice called shrilly, then began to cough. Mercer
headed for the sound until a short, grey ghost loomed out of the dazzling
mist.
It said tearfully, "I'm looking for my mother."
Mercer grabbed the boy by the waist and splashed towards the nearest open
hatch. There he turned him upside-down and said very clearly, "Your mother is
safe, but her pod is overcrowded so you'll have to take this one. Wriggle your
way to the bottom as fast as you can-there isn't much time and nobody will
object when they know who it is. You'll probably have to take charge of this
lifeboat, Mathewson. Good luck and in you go."
"Room for a small one," he called into the pod.
There was no reply, but then he had not really been asking a question.
When Bobby's heels disappeared, he turned so that his back was to the sound of
the monstrous steam whistle astern. It was the only means of getting his
bearings because his eyes were closed and his cap was pushed over his nose and
mouth to make it a little easier to breathe. When he stumbled against a couch
he remembered something and bent down.
"Prescott, they're all aboard."
"Return to control."
It was slightly cooler in the passage leading to the control room-he did not
need his cap to breathe through, and he could even see a short distance,
specifically a recessed basket marked Crew Laundry, with a couple of rolled-up
coveralls inside. He took one set as he passed.
The whistle from the stem was becoming louder and deeper, but it was not as
loud as the clang of the survival pod hatches going down.
Chapter X.
"Close the door and take your couch," said Prescott.
"We won't be going anywhere for a few minutes."
Nobody seemed to be doing anything except waiting. Mercer did as he was told
and watched the steam that had come in with him being shredded and sucked in
by the air conditioning. It was so quiet that he could even hear the Captain's
breathing. The silence was frightening him, giving him a chance to do nothing
but think.
"Neilson," he said suddenly, tossing the soiled coveralls towards the
engineer, "it's hot out."
"Bless you," said Neilson. "With my fair, Nordic complexion I boil easy." He
looked enquiringly at Prescott.
The First Officer nodded. "Put them on. And shut up, both of you."
"Eurydice Control. We have a suggestion here that you retain your passengers
and dump the sick reactor.
Venting the tank astern should nudge it away from you, and you will have a
fairly comfortable ship to live in until the recovery vessel reaches you."
Prescott looked at Neilson, who turned down the comers of his mouth.
"Eurydice. We have already looked at that idea.
Negative. We have virtually no control of any stem system other than the tank
emergency vent." Prescott leaned towards his board, paused, then went on, "We
are releasing the survival pods . . . now. Time is 1605 plus fifteen seconds,
launch zone."
"We copy, Eurydice."
Mercer twisted around to the direct vision port. He could see five deflated
pods tumbling away from the ship, looking like stubs of discarded cigarettes.
They were falling away at eight feet per second, the velocity imparted by the
passenger module's centrifugal force of one-quarter G. But they shared
Eurydice's forward velocity, so that they kept pace with the ship, merely
spreading out like a ring of receding moons.
Suddenly they appeared to swell and come nearer, but it was only an illusion
created by their plastic canopies pressurizing to full size. Still receding,
they began to slide slowly past the viewport.
The crew survival sections were much closer to the ship's axis than had been
the pod housings, so that to release them with the same velocity away from the
ship, Eurydice had to increase her spin to compensate.
"More trouble," said Neilson quietly.
"Go ahead, Eurydice."
"The tangential jets are spinning us up to release speed, but the circuit for
cutting them just died. I can't shut them down. We'll have to release exactly
on the pip, twelve minutes and seven seconds from ... now."
"We copy" "Set the timers to release automatically at that time," said
Prescott. "Do you still have control to the stem emergency vent?"
Neilson showed crossed fingers and said, "At the moment, yes."
"Set a timer on it to vent ten seconds after we release. Can you estimate the
strength and duration of the thrust and the acceleration to terminal velocity,
allowing for the absence of the crew segments, rendezvous marker, and the
reducing weight of water in the tank?"
"Some of the water has already vented into the passenger section," Neilson
replied, "so it will stay with the ship and boil off very slowly. But I have
no way of telling how much there is."
The conversation was so quiet and matter-of-fact that Mercer wanted to shout
and break things. But it was quiet because the control room door was tightly
closed and the mikes in the passenger section had been switched off.
Apparently, calmness could be just as contagious as panic, because he found
himself saying quietly, "Between the time the tank's outer seal gave way and I
left the passenger section eight minutes ago, the water had risen half way up
the rims of the survival hatches-about half an inch. Does that help?"
"It's better than making a blind guess," said Neilson.
"Let's see, we know the deck area of the passenger section, and we have a
rough idea of the volume of water covering it, but add a little for the water
content of the steam-"
"Eurydice Control. Please clarify. What are your immediate intentions?"
'"Eurydice," Prescott replied. "We are not sure if we have a pile meltdown or
a bang situation. If a bang, we want to be as far away from it as possible,
and we also want the radioactive debris to be well clear of the pickup area
when the recovery ship arrives. Since our reactor controls are out, we propose
venting the tank through the stem and bypassing the reactor. Structural
heating is such that we should have a crude steam jet, which will accelerate
the ship ahead and, I hope, clear of the survivors before the bang. Neilson?"
"Roughly two feet a second rising to three as she sheds reaction mass," said
the engineer. "If the structural heating extends to the passenger module, the
water there will also vaporize and vent through the stem as well, but the
additional thrust will be negligible
"We understand, Eurydice. The recovery ship countdown is now at minus
ninety-six hours and three minutes. It will be out there in just over five
days."
"You don't understand," said Prescott sharply. "We don't need a fast rescue.
Take your time and check the nuts and bolts. You cannot risk a launch until
Eurydice has blown or is a safe distance ahead of us."
And if it went critical before then, Mercer knew there would be no point in
launching the recovery ship at all.
MacArdle said, "Rendezvous beacon launched at sixteen twelve and eight
seconds. Minimal lateral velocity-just enough to let it clear the steam iet."
"Copy."
"Timers set and checked," said Neilson.
"Beacon radiating," said MacArdle.
Prescott took a deep breath and looked quickly around the control room. He
said, "We shall all feel a little safer in our cabins. Neilson and MacArdle,
get going. Mercer, hold a moment."
Steam was coming from the air conditioning grills now, and when Neilson and
MacArdle left, the rush of steam from the passage outside dropped the
visibility in the control room to a few feet. Prescott closed the door and
moved to Mercer's couch.
"We have a few minutes to spare," he said quietly, as if it was days. "Enough
to answer a few questions or to let you get anything off your chest that is
bothering you.".
Mercer was on the edge of his couch, his legs and arms bent and body poised,
ready for a dive toward the door. He was waiting for the fatal thump of the
steam explosion aft that would blow the tank's outer seal, fill the ship with
superheated vapor, and trap them both in the control room until they boiled in
their own body juices. He wanted to kick the First Officer out of the way and
escape, right now.
But there was an odd look in Prescott's eyes - a strange one in these
circumstances, but familiar. Mercer had seen it on a few occasions when one of
his colleagues had become too deeply involved with the suffering of a
seriously ill patient. Prescott, he realized suddenly, was -worried about him.
He was inviting Mercer to bawl him out with no witnesses present, hoping to
relieve his fear tensions and to reduce, if only slightly, the panic that was
threatening either to paralyze him or send him running to his cabin without
any idea of what he was supposed to do when he got there.
Mercer wanted suddenly to laugh, but he got control of himself in time to make
it a smile instead. He said, "Permission to go to my cabin, sir?"
Prescott looked relieved as he shook his head and said, "I've been hard on you
Mercer for two reasons. One is that you have been doing penance for the sins
of your predecessor, and the other is that I am hard on everybody. But now you
have been dropped in it along with everyone else, and there is time neither to
apologize or to tell you exactly what you should do-"
"Eurydice Control. We have looked at your steam jet idea. There is a strong
possibility that venting your water astern -will check the meltdown and delay
detonation for a considerable period. Thought you would like to know."
"Eurydice. Thank you," said Prescott. Then he went on: "So you could do worse
than spend the first few days in your couch studying the emergency
instructions. An extra complication is that the pods and crew segments will be
spinning, or tumbling slowly-because of our control failure the ship power
lines were still connected to them and gave, or will give, an off-center tug
as they leave. But don't worry about the spin, there is no hurry to correct
it. Just try to calm your passengers as quickly as possible, organize your
communications, and give them as much help as possible. Good advice is about
all you can give them, but don't forget to take some of it yourself. I'll be
in touch."
"Good luck, Eurydice."
Without replying, Prescott slid back the door. Hot, choking fog and the blast
of a gigantic steam whistle went in as Mercer and Prescott - in that order,
went out.
Centrifugal force had changed his sick-bay cabin out of all recognition.
Mercer thought as he stood on the transparent canopy gripping two
near-vertical bunks.
The protective cover had already been released from his canopy, and he could
look down past his feet at the apparently motionless and undamaged ship and
stars whirling past like a blizzard of jewels. A faint, wavering line held its
position in the starry storm-the receding survival pods thrown off minutes
earlier. He should talk to them, as soon as he discovered what it was that he
was supposed to say.
A few seconds after he had found the emergency instructions booklet there was
a series of thuds and clicks, as the cabin went automatically onto internal
power and his feet drifted away from the transparent floor.
The stars did not rush past so quickly, but they had a twisting motion which
told him that his cabin was no longer spinning evenly with the ship but was
tumbling free in the wake of the passenger capsules. He caught a glimpse of
another crew segment, the ship whirling past, and the incandescent streak of
the Sun.
Mercer checked on the Captain's condition, strapped himself into his couch and
tried to read. Outside, the abandoned Eurydice was growing smaller each time
it whirled past, but he could not see any sign of damage because the Sun
dazzled him a split-second later.
He rolled the anti-glare cover across the canopy. If the ship blew, there was
no point in risking being blinded by two suns.
Chapter XI.
Since only four of the five cabins used by the ship's officers double as
survival modules, the Medical Officer and First Officer will share the
sick-bay segment, which is fitted with pod frequency radio even more powerful
than that carried by the Captain's survival segment...
If he had not been lucky and the Captain unlucky, Mercer would have had to
share his segment with Prescott. As things were, the First Officer was now
spinning away in the Captain's module.
According to the emergency instructions, the Captain's module contained
communications equipment, which enabled it to maintain contact with ground
control as well as allowing two-way contact with the other officers and, to a
limited extent, with passenger pods in its vicinity. There was a frequency
which allowed its occupant to listen at any time to what was going on in the
other officers' modules, and another channel which allowed them to call him
but not each other. Similarly, the officers had a channel for speaking to the
passengers-just one channel, unfortunately, which meant that they had to
address all of the pod occupants at once-and another, which allowed them to
eavesdrop on the pods in case trouble developed among the survivors. But this
was also a single channel, which meant that the officer using it would hear
all of the passengers who happened to be speaking at any given time.
It was not difficult to understand why the Captain had to be able to keep
close tabs on his officers and a two-way line open to home, or, for that
matter, why the sick-bay's radio had most of its power channeled into the pod
frequency. The survivors were expected to need medical advice more than any
other kind, and with the distance between the potential patients and their
doctor increasing every second, advice was all that he could give them.
The sooner he started giving it the better, but he did not want to begin until
he understood the problems a little better than did the survivors and could
give answers that sounded authoritative.
A large proportion of the manual was devoted to instructions for untrained
space officers on how to maneuver and navigate the segment and make the best
use of its services and accessories. The instructions for trained astronauts
were unnecessarily technical. Mercer thought, while the other set seemed to be
aimed at people with a mental age of twelve. The medical side was barely
mentioned, whereas the psychological problems he was told to expect seemed
incredibly melodramatic.
He had to remind himself that even on Earth people managed to do some dramatic
things to themselves and each other. When they were spinning through eternity
in a ten-foot-wide plastic bubble, driven close to madness by fear and the
utter, savage strangeness of it all, it might be easier for them to forget
that they were civilized beings.
Suddenly he felt ashamed of himself for lying reading in his couch, with a
solid, well-furnished structure around him and the sunlight just a pulsing
amber glow behind the canopy filters. He tried to compare his conditions with
those on the survival pods, where three or more passengers were tumbling
together in a fragile plastic bubble, and he could not readily imagine what it
must be like. Some of the passengers might keep their heads and read the very
simple instructions printed at intervals on the interior of the plastic film,
but it was transparent, and the glare of the unshielded Sun would probably
make them impossible to read.
He had been reading for all of twenty-two minutes, by his watch. The technical
passages he could study later, but the instructions regarding the passengers
should be obeyed as soon as possible. After all, they would not know that he
was still reading aloud from the manual.
There was a pullout sheet at the back of the book containing pod numbers and
spaces for the names of the occupants. Mercer taped it to the bulkhead beside
him and unclipped his mike.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said slowly and distinctly. "It is
less than half an hour since we abandoned ship. You are probably becoming
accustomed to being inside a survival pod by now and are beginning to realize
that the accommodation leaves a lot to be desired. However, you are absolutely
safe, and the spinning movement of your pods is nothing to worry about.
"Some of you," he went on, "may already have read the instructions for
checking spin and have put them into effect. To those who haven't, I shall be
able to give instructions for doing so in due course. But first I must check
that everyone got safely off the ship. In the confusion there must have been
relatives and friends who became separated, and I must begin by making roll
call of all survivors so that I can reassure these people.
Would the occupants of Pod One please speak their names, and would everyone
else keep absolutely quiet while Pod One is talking."
Mercer flipped up the receiver switch and discovered that everyone was talking
at the tops of their voices. He tried again.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said sharply, ''you are all talking at once. I must
insist on silence except for the occupants of Pod One."
He became more and more insistent as the minutes slipped past, but he still
could not silence the voices from-Pods Two through Sixteen. Twice he very
nearly had it when only two pods were talking at once, and he almost
understood what Pod One was trying so patiently to tell him; but then everyone
else seemed to sense that their own personal demands for assistance, advice or
information had a chance of being heard, and his speaker poured out only a
high-pitched babble.
"All of you be quiet! Pod One, come in, please."
"Pod One. For the fiftieth time, Mr. Wallace, Mr. Rutherford, Mr. Gunning."
"Thank you. One," said Mercer, noting the names on his sheet. "Pod Two?"
"Mrs. Wallace, Mr. Simpson, Mr. McCall. We can't get this damned thing to stop
spinning, and the Sun is-" "Thank you. Two," said Mercer. Relenting slightly,
he went on, "Each pod has one pair of anti-glare goggles in its medical pack.
Try to remember the pod sequences from the instruction film and let the person
with the goggles supervise. I'll come back to you as soon as the tally of
passengers is complete. Pod Three?"
"Mrs. Mathewson, Mr. Stone, Mr. Kirk."
"Pod Four?"
"Mr. and Mrs. Corrie."
"Pod Five?"
"Miss Moore, Miss Sampson, Mrs. Kirk and Mr. Eglin."
Mercer made a note to check on the life-support duration of a pod with four
occupants, wondering wryly if the psychological problems would turn out to be
a much greater threat to the pod's safety than a possible shortage of food and
air.
"Pod Six?"
The interruptions were very few, and Mercer worked steadily through his
checklist until he came to Pod Eleven, which did not answer. He tried again.
"Pod Eleven, come in please."
Again silence answered him.
Mercer turned up the gain on his receiver to maximum. The silence grew noisier
as the sounds of breathing and body movements coming from the other pods were
suddenly magnified. Then someone coughed deafeningly, and on Pod Three Mrs.
Mathewson thundered, "Bobby, what's happened to Bobby?"
He turned down the volume quickly. With nearly three quarters of the pods
already reporting in, Mercer had begun to wonder what had happened to the boy,
too. But it was by no means certain that he was aboard Eleven. Perhaps there
was nobody aboard Eleven.
The ship had carried a more than adequate supply of survival pods for the
number of passengers aboard.
So far, he had one pod with two people in it, two pods with four people on
board, and the rest with three occupants, so it was probable that in the
confusion and poor visibility at least one pod had been launched empty.
"Pod Twelve, please."
While he jotted down the names of the passengers on Twelve and then Thirteen,
Mercer began to worry in case Eleven's radio was faulty. Where was the boy?
"Pod Fourteen?"
"M-Mathe-wson."
Mercer wanted badly to express his relief, but then he thought about the game
he had been playing with young Mathewson, and all at once it seemed to be a
good idea, considering what he knew of the boy's background, to go on playing
it.
"Very well, Mathewson, please list the names of your crew," he said briskly,
and waited.
"Just... me."
Mercer wanted to say something, anything, that would reassure the boy, but he
needed time to think sad he did not have it. All that he could do was go on
playing their game, and hope that Bobby would be able to go on playing it as
well. "I copy, Pod Fourteen," he said. "I will come back to you with
instructions later, Mathewson. Meanwhile, you have control. Pod Fifteen?"
A few minutes later he had the names of the rest of the survivors and was
preparing to check them against the passenger list. The pod frequency was
switched off to allow him to concentrate on what he was doing with the small
part of his mind that was not worrying about the Mathewson boy, and his
mother. During the initial exchange he had repeated back the boy's name simply
to let his mother know that he was safe. But now she would know that he was
alone as well.
"Prescott. What progress, Mercer?"
Instinctively he reached for the transmit switch to answer, then lowered his
hand. Prescott was listening in, in the same way that Mercer was eavesdropping
on the passengers. There was nothing he could do about it short of tearing out
the radio installation, cutting himself off from everyone else, and risking
damage to the other electrical systems in the module. Mercer decided that he
did not dislike the sound of Prescott's voice enough to risk any of those
things.
"I have completed the tally of survivors," he said, "and now I'm
cross-checking against the passenger list."
"Carry on while I talk. The situation at present is that Eurydice is still
pulling ahead of us on her teakettle drive, but slowly. Should the reactor go
critical now we would have no chance of escaping. But there is a much better
chance that it will simply melt into a semi-molten radioactive mess and the
resulting mild explosion will scatter debris and radiation over a
comparatively small volume of space. This would also mean that the fuel slugs
we were carrying as cargo for the Ganymede Base reactor will also be scattered
instead of contributing their megatonnage to the blast. Have you got that?"
"Yes," said Mercer, and added, "All the passengers made it to the pods."
"Good. I spent a few minutes listening to your roll call. You seem to be
handling things fairly well, which is the reason why we are minding our own
business and letting you do the same. We have had to spend some time on
stabilizing our segments and repositioning them so that our directional
antennas will bear- mine on Eurydice Control, Neilson's on the ship in the
hope of getting a few minutes warning before she blows, and MacArdle's on the
radio beacon we dropped, which will be on low-emission until the time comes
for us to burn for rendezvous. I think you were unnecessarily tough on young
Mathewson."
Mercer double-checked to make sure that the passengers were not receiving the
conversation, but he did not reply.
"I asked a question. Mercer"
"Sorry, I thought you were giving your opinion," said Mercer, not caring if
his tone was insubordinate or just angry. "Maybe I was wrong to handle it that
way, because I don't know very much about the boy or his mother. But I do know
a little.
"The woman is escaping," he went on, his tone becoming more clinical. "Whether
from an event or a person I don't at the moment know. I do know that the boy's
father was far gone on PCs, so perhaps he got himself killed or he suicided
during a change party, or maybe he survived physically but with the original
personality lost along with the ability to mentate. The woman, I would-say,
has never been on PCs-she was and is too worried and tense and, well,
normal-and the boy shows some signs of emotional disturbance, but is likewise
normal. He has a uniform and wants to play spaceman-"
"I noticed that."
"The trouble is," Mercer continued, "I have been playing the game with him by
treating him, and talking to him, as if he was a junior ship's officer. Part
of the game was that I did not act toward him as I acted toward the other
passengers-they were asked to do things, he was told. You realize the position
I'm in? If I change suddenly from being a superior officer, even a pretend
superior officer, to a sentimental softie who tells him that he is a good boy
and not to cry, there could be trouble. His father must have subjected him to
the same kind of major personality change several times a week, and the kid
did not like it. The way I see it, rather than be nice sometimes and nasty at
others, it is better to be consistently nasty."
"I've found that myself."
"The next step," Mercer went on, "will be to help him stabilize his pod and
not sound too much like a worried father while I'm doing it."
"Very well, it's your problem."
"And his" said Mercer.
 Chapter XII.
"Quiet, everyone. Pod Fourteen, come in, please."
Kirk hung close against the interior face of the services module, knees drawn
up and elbows tight against his chest as he gripped one of the soft plastic
handles, which projected from it. Despite the anti-glare goggles he was
wearing, he had his eyes tightly shut. His small, hairless head, thick neck,
sloping shoulders, and waist which continued to thicken out until it became
his hips gave him the visual aspect, from the back, of an enormous, lumpy
pear.
Close beside him, Stone was holding on with one hand while the other covered
his eyes. "If you're not using the damn things," he whispered, "give them to
me."
At the other end of Pod Three, Mrs. Mathewson also had a hand over her eyes.
The other one was gripping a screen attachment point, while her head was
inclined towards the speaker grill.
"Please," she whispered.
"Sorry," said Stone in an even quieter whisper, "But there are some people who
simply take no notice unless you shout at the top of your voice." He tapped
Kirk on the shoulder and pointed at the goggles.
Kirk let go of the plastic grip with one hand. Without warning he swung it
back, hitting Stone in the chest with his closed fist and forearm and sending
him spinning slowly across the pod. Then he pulled off the goggles and threw
them after him.
Stone blundered into Mrs. Mathewson's legs and instinctively grabbed them to
steady himself, with the result that they both swung into the flexible wall of
the pod, which gave alarmingly with their weight before bouncing them away
again. For a few seconds the whole pod grew bulges and indentations until it
reached dynamic equilibrium again, and the spinning Sun took up an even more
complex motion.
Squinting against the intermittent glare. Stone fished the goggles out of the
air and put them on. He looked at Kirk's back for a long time, but the tinted
eye-piece made it impossible to read his expression, "I know it isn't. But
first you must put on the goggles. You will find them clipped to the underside
of the lid with a red cross on it. While you are finding them and putting them
on I will explain why this is not as it was in the demonstration film.
"That film showed a simple abandon-ship sequence which allowed enough time for
the pods to be manned and all ship-to-pod connections severed by the ship's
officers before launching. The connection that has caused the trouble was a
thin cable, which carries ship power to a pod so that it can be tested or used
for survival drills without wasting its own internal power.
Usually this cable is cut by a remote-controlled knife, which is also for
manual operation fitted to a handle, which projects through the pod hatch
cover. But there was too much steam in the passenger compartment and not
enough time for me to go around pulling handles, and the circuits to the
remote-controlled actuators were dead.
"When the pods were launched, the cable, which goes in at the side of the
life-support modules, tugged the pods sideways as they left and gave some of
them a twist as well. Normally the pods and cabin segments would not spin at
all as they came free, but you have to remember that there is no real
difference between starting a spin to change the attitude of your vehicle and
stopping it. Just so long as you...
"No, Mathewson, not that kind of knife, but it cuts just as well. Are you
ready?"
"It's too complicated," said Mrs. Mathewson.
"He's a smart boy," Stone whispered.
"Right. The first thing to do is to lie as flat as you can against the pod
skin, the transparent section, and hold on to the moulded finger-grips in the
plastic. Got that?
Then move around until the Sun appears to be coming from the top of your head,
passing in front of you, and then moving under your feet. Take your time,
Mathewson. There's no hurry about this."
Stone stared at the Sun, which was whipping over and around the pod so quickly
that he could only guess at its direction of travel. He opened his mouth to
speak to Mrs. Mathewson, then remembered that they were supposed to keep the
frequency clear for the boy, and shut it again.
Others, apparently, had forgotten.
"Quiet, everyone. I lost some of that, Mathewson, Say again, please, slow and
easy."
"Don't cry, Bobby," said Mrs. Mathewson softly.
"Please don't cry."
"Going too fast, you say? I see. There is a trick you can try which should
beat that one. Get flat against the plastic again, look outside and blink as
fast as you can. That will make the Sun seem to stop, or at least to go past
in short streaks, which will let you know the direction it is traveling in.
Ready? Now blink fast..."
"It works, by God," breathed Stone.
"... When you know the direction, get it coming from above your head, going
down past your face and under your feet. Keep it moving like that as you start
to crawl forward. When you come to the lock section or the services panel, or
when you are crawling over plastic, which is not transparent, try to keep your
line of movement straight by looking ahead to the next transparent section to
see -where the Sun is. Got that? Then off you go"
Stone began to crawl, trying to keep the incandescent band of the Sun
vertically in front of him and his body flat against the plastic. He was not
very successful in doing either.
"I know. But don't try to rush it, Mathewson. Try for a steady even movement
and don't worry if the Sun appears to drift sideways-when you have checked the
tumbling motion of your vehicle it will be easy for you to turn at right
angles and check the sideways movement. But it will be a slow job because this
is a solo mission for you. If you had more people on board they could
cooperate, space themselves at intervals around the inside of the pod and
crawl in the same direction, or hold on to each other with their feet against
the plastic and walk sideways.
"But that is their problem, Mathewson. Yours is that your body mass is small
in relation to the mass of the vehicle you are controlling, so you are going
to have to put in some long-distance crawling."
Stone's erratic crawl took him within a few inches of Kirk. As he moved past
he said quietly, "Are you going to help me?"
"I don't know what he's talking about," said Kirk angrily.
"He's explaining," said Stone, "so a ten-year-old would understand it."
"Sorry, Mathewson, your vehicle does not have attitude jets-we don't want to
make the job too easy, do we? But you do have some power-two short-duration
thrusters, which must be used only to make rendezvous with the recovery ship."
As Stone crawled past Mrs. Mathewson he whispered, "Don't worry, he'll be all
right. But I could use some help, and it might take your mind off the boy for
a while if you-"
"Stop talking about me. Stone," said Kirk suddenly, "or I'll smash you."
"Quiet! Please keep this frequency clear for Pod Fourteen. That's fine
Mathewson-do another circuit on the same line. You won't notice much change
until you've been around twenty or thirty times. If you have any problems,
call me. Listening out."
On Pod Three the stabilization exercise was not going well. Stone found it
difficult enough to keep his feet and legs from drifting away from the plastic
skin, but Mrs. Mathewson was in a worse predicament. She had to cover her eyes
with one hand, which made crawling virtually impossible, or use both hands and
keep her eyes tightly shut, which meant that she could not see where she was
going.
Stone said, "Suppose we stand at opposite sides of the pod with our heads
together in the center and facing each other. If we grip each other's arms and
begin walking forward, I can guide us while you keep your eyes shut. Would you
like to try it for a while?"
But the strain of gripping each other's arms was considerable even if they did
not weigh anything, and their combined length was much greater than the
internal diameter of the pod, so that the plastic material bulged outwards
alarmingly under their feet. But they were beginning to get the hang of it
when Stone spoke again.
"I never could stand merry-go-rounds as a kid, you know. Or swings. Especially
the instant when you stop swinging up and haven't yet started to come down.
This ... this bothers me. Sometime I'll tell you all about my childish fears,
but right now I'm busy. Right foot, Mrs. Mathewson. Now the left, slowly.
Right. Left...."
On Pod Five the situation was much less orderly, with four slowly struggling
bodies and six plastic screens filling the living space. Just after the pod
had been released from the ship the screens had been kicked from their
fastenings, and there had been too much shouting and crying since then for
anyone to think about re-stowing them. But Mercer's voice on the radio and the
Mathewson boy's trouble had brought silence, at least.
"Let's get ourselves organized," whispered Eglin. "We'll start by clearing
these crazy mobiles-throw them aft, at me, and I'll re-fold them. Then try to
stand with your heads together in the center and your feet at equal intervals
around the skin like the man said. I'll wear the goggles and keep you on the
right line while you're walking sideways."
Later, as the women were rotating like a human three-bladed propeller, Eglin
realized that he could keep them on the right line by watching how the
sunlight struck each of them as it whirled around. The effect was visually
dramatic, he thought, and he wished that he had had the time to grab his
camera.
"Don't rush it, Mathewson. Move slowly and steadily -try to imagine that you
are still and that you are pulling the pod around underneath you. Or imagine
that you are on the inside of a treadmill. Do you know what a treadmill is?"
Pod Four was already motionless. The opaque, silvered half of its envelope was
aimed directly at the Sun, so that the interior was in darkness and the stars
shone cold and clear through the transparent section. It was the first pod to
be stabilized, and the reason was that Mr. Corrie was an astrophysicist. He
had started to check his pod's spin before Mercer had left the control room on
Eurydice.
"I can see Three and Five," he whispered. "Not very clearly, and in a few
hours they will be too far away to see at all. I wish I knew which was which,
but I don't know our direction of travel or whether we are right side up with
respect to ... But wait. All the pods are points on the circumference of an
expanding circle, so that an imaginary line drawn between Three and Five must
pass behind us, so that would give our direction of travel. But I still can't
tell whether we're upside down or not. ..."
"Not so loud, George."
"Sorry, I'd forgotten the boy."
"Do you realize, George," whispered Mrs. Corrie, whose aptitudes had always
lain in the softer sciences, "that we've never been really alone together for
the past eighteen years?"
"Take another rest, Mathewson. And yes, drink as much and as often as you feel
like it. Water will never be a problem, but you don't want to let yourself get
overtired or overheated-you can't just open a window, you know. Your
life-support system will, in normal conditions, handle the heat generated by
three adult bodies at rest, but I may have been working you too hard. While
you're resting, read the instructions on the food dispenser and the other
essential services. If there is anything you don't understand, ask me."
In Pod Two, Mrs. Wallace was rigging the plastic screens designed to give a
measure of privacy to one of the essential services, while Simpson and McCall
tried to rotate their now stable vehicle into a position that would give them
enough light in which to work without being blinded by the Sun. They were
doing this by allowing sunlight to strike the inside face of the entry lock
but not to shine into the section enclosed by opaque material.
"Why will water never be a problem?" she asked, and then added, "Oh, I see."
A few minutes later McCall, who was studying the instruction booklet, said,
"Water will never be a problem because it is recycled, but to me that implies
that there will be other problems-food, air, heat dissipation. It says here
that the pod food supply is of a low-residue, highly concentrated kind and
that its lack of bulk means we will always feel hungry even though our bodies
will have enough to keep them alive. In a three-person pod like this one, the
food will last just under two weeks, according to this chart. But everyone
knows that it is possible to reduce food intake when they are not using
energy. I don't get it. People on lifeboats at sea have survived far longer
with less food and a desalination kit."
"The people on the lifeboats," Simpson said drily, "also had unlimited
quantities of fresh air."
"Quiet, please."
Mercer's voice erupted from the pod speakers every few minutes for the next
three hours. Sometimes the things he said were immediately helpful to people
in difficulties-either physical or psychological-in certain pods. It was as if
he had been listening to them, which he was, and had slipped in the answer to
their particular problem during his next conversation with the Mathewson boy,
which he had. As a result, pod after pod successfully stabilized itself, and
the occupants began to rig screens, familiarize themselves with their rather
spartan fittings, and generally make themselves as comfortable as possible.
There was no panic. Every time a survivor got excited or even raised his or
her voice to an ordinary conversational level, Mercer's voice rattled out of
the speaker at them to be quiet and keep the channel clear for Pod Fourteen.
It was extremely difficult to have a panic reaction in a whisper, and knowing
that someone else was in a worse fix than their own helped quite a lot too.
But finally, even the conversation with Pod Fourteen came to an end.
"Fine work, Mathewson. Leave rigging your screens until later. Right now you
must eat and sleep. That's an order.
"You heard that, Mrs. Mathewson-he's all right. You have an astronaut in the
family."
In Pod Three, Mrs. Mathewson was still holding herself steady with one hand
while the other covered her eyes, even though the interior was screened and
shaded from the Sun. She was smiling, and large, weightless tears were being
squeezed between her fingers.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. Is there anyone, apart from myself, who
has not yet been able to stabilize their pod...?"
 Chapter XIII.
"Prescott. What are you doing, Mercer?"
Unlike the uncluttered interior of a survival pod, the medical officer's
segment had bunks, an airlock, and cabinets housing various services
projecting into it, not to mention the fact that its mass was something like
sixteen times that of the passenger vehicles. Checking the module's spin was
not an easy matter.
"I'm trying to stabilize the segment," Mercer said, trying also to hide his
breathlessness. His legs, arms and shoulders were burning with fatigue, and he
wondered if the only thing that was keeping his eyes from dropping shut was
the absence of gravity. He added, "Another fifteen minutes should do it."
"Good. While you're working, listen carefully. MacArdle is the worrying kind.
He has to compute return courses for each pod and crew segment, which will
enable us to make rendezvous should the radio beacon fail. To do this he has
to know where, exactly, as well as who, everybody is.
"According to the book, this exercise could be done tomorrow or the next
day-even allowing for the increased scatter by that time, the pod flares would
be pretty hard to miss. But these people are not trained observers and might
miss seeing their neighbors' flares, which means that he could not work out a
course for them. He wants that data now. Can you keep young Mathewson awake?"
"The problem there," said Mercer, "is getting him to go to sleep."
"Right. This is going 'to take a little time to set up as well as to explain.
Listen for the time being, ask for clarification if you don't completely
understand something, but go on checking your spin. When you've finished you
will need a large sheet of paper and a pencil...."
It took half an hour for Mercer to get a clear mental picture of what was
needed and to explain it all to the passengers. Then he positioned himself
close against his canopy with his pod transmitter switched on, his pencil
ready, and a large sheet of paper with Prescott's diagram on it taped to the
side of a bunk.
The diagram consisted of a circle whose circumference was divided into sixteen
equal parts with the points numbered from One to Sixteen in a clockwise
direction, which was how the pods had been numbered looking aft from Eurdice's
control room. Inside this circle was a slightly smaller one representing the
positions occupied by the crew segments. The circumference of the second
circle was divided into four, but the positions were marked lightly because
there was no way of knowing at that time where any particular segment was in
relation to any given pod. With luck the next hour or so would give this
information.
"Prescott. Ready when you are. Mercer."
"Observations in Pod Two and Sixteen stand by," said Mercer. "Pod One, release
your flare."
The distress flares burned brightly for thirty seconds, illuminating an
expanding cloud of gas, which they released just before ignition, then
gradually faded. Neither the expanding circle of pods or the smaller ring of
crew segments were sufficiently dispersed for the flares to be invisible
because of distance. But Mercer could not see One's flare either in the canopy
or through the wide-angle periscope, which served the blind areas of his
segment.
"Pod Two. I see it."
"Pad Sixteen. Me, too."
"Prescott. I have it."
The First Officer had left on his crew frequency receiver so that Mercer could
hear Neilson and MacArdle reporting negative results as well as himself.
"Pods One and Three stand by," he said. "Your turn. Two."
A few seconds later Pod Two was seen by its neighbors and Prescott.
Mercer saw Three's flare bright and clear, and a few minutes later, the flares
released by Four and Five. He judged that he was twice as close to Four as he
was to Five and marked his position on the inner circle accordingly. At that
point he could have marked the positions of the other segments and named them,
because they were spaced equally and he knew their order-working clockwise,
they were MacArdle, Neilson, Prescott in the Captain's segment, and his own.
But he preferred to wait until he heard them reporting in before marking their
positions. He acquired Six, and MacArdle and himself were able to see Seven.
Finally it was over. Mercer thanked the passengers for their cooperation,
checked the condition of the Captain, and then strapped himself loosely into
hs couch.
"Prescott. What are you doing now. Mercer?"
"Sleeping," said Mercer.
"Carry on."
Mercer switched off the pod receiver, so that Prescott's voice was the last
sound he heard. It was also, after what seemed like only a few minutes, the
first.
He rubbed his eyes, licked dried lips with a dehydrated tongue, and said, "I'm
awake, I think."
"You snore like a shuttle taking off. Mercer. Now listen. I have been doing
your job for you-eavesdropping on the survivors-for the last hour. Some of
them are beginning to sound worried. But before you start telling them lies,
which you are very good at, I want to make sure that your lying and half-truth
telling will have a tenuous connection with the real facts of the situation. I
don't want you to be caught in a lie, you understand, because that could be
very bad for morale. So, I am a nervous passenger. Reassure me."
"I don't under..." began Mercer, then he cleared his throat and said, "What
exactly is troubling you, sir?"
"I'll tell you what's troubling me, mister. The smell of this overcrowded
goldfish bowl is troubling me. How soon do we get out of it?"
Mercer pulled out his book, then realized that Prescott would probably hear
him flipping through the pages, and replaced it. He had a good memory.
"You must realize, sir," he said smoothly, "that all this is largely the
product of your mind and its awareness of your crowded conditions, which
heightens your sensitivity to perspiration and similar odors. It is not,
repeat not, due to any malfunction in your capsule air conditioning or waste
disposal or reclamation systems.
As for recovery, that should not be delayed by more than a few days-"
"Wrong, Mercer. It could be delayed for more than two weeks."
"Oh," said Mercer. But Prescott was not giving him time to think.
"We're hungry, and it's hot in here."
"You can increase the apparent bulk of the food by adding water, sir. There is
no shortage of water."
"We don't like the water. It stinks, too."
"In actual fact, sir, your capsule water, recycled as it is, is much less
harmful than that taken from any Earthside reservoir-there is much less
pollution in it, for one thing. I'm afraid the smell is purely psychosomatic
and comes from you dwelling too much on its source.
"As for the temperature problem," Mercer went on, "that is caused by body heat
produced by your recent exertions in getting your pod stabilized and your
screens set up. You have probably been moving around and using
energy-producing heat-simply because you are excited or curious about your new
surroundings. The correct course is to relax and remain absolutely still in
the shade of your individual screens, and remove some clothing if you have to
until the air-conditioning system brings down the temperature. Drink, and
talk, as much as you like, but don't use energy because that produces heat. If
you do as I suggest, you will find that the pod temperature will remain
comfortable, and even for-" "Sorry, Mercer. It will get a hell of a lot
hotter.
Eurydice's course, which is also ours, passes within the orbit of Venus and
makes its closest approach to the Sun in nine days time."
Angrily, because he was suddenly so frightened, Mercer said, "What about the
recovery ship? Why do we have to wait?"
"I'm supposed to be questioning you. But I'll give you the facts so that
you'll know how best to bend them for passenger consumption. The countdown on
the recovery ship was started before we abandoned Eurydice, and at present it
is holding at minus twelve hours, which is the time needed to ready the
high-acceleration boosters. It is waiting for the same reason that we are, for
Eurydice to blow."
"The sooner the better," said Mercer with feeling, "Then we can head back to
the rendezvous point."
"Well, no. That might be true if the reactor and cargo radioactives blew up
relatively slowly and threw off chunks of slow-moving radioactive debris. We
could wait for a day or so until it had cleared the area, and there would be
no need to delay launching the recovery ship. But suppose the ship becomes a
bomb, which flings out a sphere of vaporized metal and generally acts like a
scaled-down nova. Close in, this material would go through the capsule plastic
like a charge of microscopic buckshot, as well as flooding the area with
lethal radiation. At the present time we are much too close to survive it. But
the radiation and the effects of the debris diminish with distance. You know
about the inverse square law, I suppose?"
"Yes," said Mercer. "The degree of scatter would be so great that we might not
be hit at all, and the radiation danger would be negative. But how long do we
have to wait to stand a fair chance of surviving the blowup?"
"A few days. But obviously we can't start back to the rendezvous point until
after she blows, otherwise we would be heading into trouble instead of out of
it. A complication is that the reactor's fail-safe devices may hold longer
than we want them to."
"But the A thrusters in the pods will only accelerate them to sixteen feet per
second, which means that they can kill their outward velocity and return at
eight, their present outward speed. The operational life of the pods is only
two weeks."
"A little more if the occupants do nothing but breathe, sleep and talk without
getting excited. You must try to keep them from becoming ... excited."
"Worried or frightened, you mean?"
"I mean excited."
"Oh."
"Now you will be able to explain to them why the recovery ship will not be
launched until after the blowup. Remind them that it is an unmanned,
high-acceleration job, which will waste no time in getting here.
"There is something else you should do, although there is no great urgency
about it. Try to teach the passengers some elementary astronomy. Neilson tells
me that, despite the superheated steam, which exited from the stern for a few
hours after we abandoned ship, Eurydice has not pulled ahead as quickly as we
had hoped. That could mean that the rendezvous beacon might be damaged when
she blows and the fancy pod navigation aids, which make re-positioning the
pods for the rendezvous burn such an easy job, will not be working. The
passengers may then have to take up the proper attitude the hard way, and get
it right first time."
"I understand," said Mercer, wondering where his saliva had gone. He had been
too busy until now to have time to feel afraid, and he had thought, in any
case, that the worst was over when they escaped safely from Eurydice. But the
truth was that they had not yet escaped Eurydice; and if they did, they might
not be able to get back to the pick-up point before their consumables ran out;
and there was no absolute guarantee that the recovery ship-which was unmanned
and had a long way to come-would make the rendezvous point either.
"That about covers the situation. Mercer. Is there anything else troubling
you?"
Mercer was silent for a moment, thinking about his troubles but afraid to
start listing them in case he might begin to whine at Prescott. He would
rather die than show fear in front of the First Officer, and he wondered, not
for the first time, if bravery was simply the stronger fear of being thought a
coward.
"Yes, sir," he said finally. "I am a ship's officer needing reassurance.
Reassure me."
 Chapter XIV.
Mercer dispensed a mixture of heavily-shaped truth and quiet optimism, with
the result that the passengers, after six days in the survival capsules, were
uncomfortable but not unduly worried. A fair proportion of them were unworried
enough to feel bored and, despite Mercer's warnings, made attempts to relieve
their boredom in fashions which generated a lot of heat.
Pod Four was not the first to generate excessive internal heat, and very
probably it would not be the last.
After allowing the higher levels of his mind to be withdrawn from all
effective control of his body for several hectic minutes, Corrie was suffering
his usual reaction. It took the form of being coldly analytical about
everything and everyone around him.
"I cannot understand why it is so hot," he said.
"Granted that we are part of a closed and balanced system into which energy in
the form of heat has been introduced, there are only two of us in a capsule
designed for three, which means that there should be a fifty percent margin on
cooling, air supply and food.
The second law of thermodynamics states that . . . Let go of me, dear, I want
to try an experiment. If I set myself spinning in the middle of the pod, the
only energy needed will be that required to initiate the spin, but the
movement of air past my skin should have a cooling effect...."
"Don't move," said Mrs. Corrie drowsily.
"But we're hot and slippery and ... I wonder what it's like on the capsules
with three and four people. It must be really hot."
"Not if they behave themselves like the man said, George."
Come laughed. He said, "And any minute now our Listening Tom will read us a
polite sermon- couched in very general terms, of course, and not mentioning
the sinners by name..."
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. I must remind some of you once again to
refrain from unnecessary physical exertion. Rest, conserve your food and air.
Exercise should be purely intellectual. I have suggested, and a few of you
have devised, some useful question and answer games.
"Mr. Mathewson, it is time for another astronomy lesson..."
It was really hot in Pod Five, almost unbearably hot. But the occupants had no
way of knowing how much worse were the conditions in Five than in the pods
carrying the Corries or the threesome of Stone, Kirk and Mrs. Mathewson, so
they just complained as everyone else was complaining. Some of the complaints
went unvoiced-the stench produced by perspiration, the overloaded waste
disposal unit, and the equally overworked water reclamation system-because
they were trying very hard not to think about those particular problems.
In Five, the plastic screens which had shielded the occupants from each other
had been dismantled when it was discovered that they interfered with the free
circulation of the air. The removal of the screens generated a lot of
emotional heat, while making the environment fractionally cooler.
Surprisingly, the removal of other items, which interfered with the free
circulation of air, such as clothing, was accomplished with very little fuss.
It had become much too hot to worry about clothing, or the neo-Puritanism
which dictated that the female body be completely covered except in the
privacy of the home. Perhaps Pod Five was beginning to feel like home.
"I'm hot and hungry," said Mrs. Kirk suddenly. "I've read about people being
cold and hungry. I envy them."
"And I envy you," said Miss Moore, who was spinning slowly about her
longitudinal axis, legs and arms akimbo and even her fingers open to catch the
maximum benefits from her self-generated breeze. She went on, "I envy your
flab. You've got more fatty reserves than the rest of us put together, and an
enforced diet is just what you need. By rights you shouldn't eat anything,
because we will starve long before you do, especially if we go on splitting
the food four ways. I'm hungry, too, damn you."
"It isn't nice to call me flabby, even if it is true," said Mrs. Kirk.
"Besides, my husband is even fatter than I am, and he must be suffering
terribly by now. Fat people have enlarged stomachs, you know, and feel much
hungrier than slim ones like you. But you are just afraid of being so thin
that Eglin will stop ogling you."
"I want out of this thing," said Miss Sampson. She was drifting close against
the transparent section, staring into space. "Please, can I get out of this
thing?"
"Don't be stupid," said Miss Moore without taking her eyes off Mrs. Kirk.
"Your pigmentation gives you protection against the heat, and you people are
born and raised in famine conditions."
"I think you're wrong," said Mrs. Kirk. "Their skin color protects them
against strong sunlight, but not against high humidity. I remember reading
that-"
"Reading must have been your only form of amusement," said Miss Moore, "and
looking at you I can understand why."
"That isn't-"
"I can remember reading a story," Miss Moore went on, "where the oldest and
most expendable member of a party of travelers was sacrificed for the safety
of the others. They threw her to the-wolves, as I remember.
We would not be so wasteful. What do you say, Sampson? Cannibalism was
practiced by your people fairly recently. Give us the benefit of your
expertise."
"Soap, a bathe," said Miss Sampson. "A swim in the sea."
"I don't blame her for ignoring you," said Mrs. Kirk.
She paused for a moment, and when she went on her voice was quiet, reasonable,
and utterly malicious.
"Seriously, you would never get hungry enough to eat me because you haven't
really thought about what it would entail. Not all of me is edible, you know,
and the waste disposal unit will take just so much. Bones, for instance. Some
of them would be big and hard to break up into a convenient size for the unit-
especially when they are freshly gnawed and slippery and you can only use your
teeth and bare hands to break them. And then there are items like hair and
toe-nails and lungs and eye-balls and-"
"You're making me sick."
"If you are as hungry as you say," said Mrs. Kirk, "I don't see how you can
have anything to be sick with."
"Shut up," said Eglin, "both of you."
For a few moments there was silence, although the atmosphere was thickly
charged with anger in addition to the heat, humidity, and a multiplicity of
body odors.
Eglin could not help noticing the atmosphere because his lips were pressed
together in anger and he was breathing heavily through his nose as he glared
at the three of them in turn.
During the first few days in the pod, Eglin had been too embarrassed to even
look at them when they were fully clothed, because he usually found that they
were looking at him, and he did not know what they were thinking when he
looked at them, or what they thought he might be thinking when he looked at
them.
And when the increasing heat and humidity forced them all to peel, it had been
even more embarrassing, but only for a short time, because very often he was
in fact thinking what they thought he was thinking, and there was no way for
him to conceal the fact. So he had begun staring at each of them in turn, so
that their feelings would not be hurt by his appearing to admire one of them
more than the others.
Now he was too hot and angry and frustrated and hungry to bother showing
consideration, and he spent most of the time watching Miss Moore because she
was the best looking one, and she usually caused the most trouble.
Eglin ran his hand over his forehead, face, and the wet, black smear that was
his week-old beard, pushing away the thick, weightless drops of sweat. He
thought of several ways of making Miss Moore stop her continuous arguing and
sniping and blatant displaying of her undoubtedly beautiful body, all of them
pleasant-to him. He was so engrossed that the trouble was already started
before he realized that there was any danger at all.
Miss Sampson was sobbing and clawing furiously at the plastic envelope, and
her nails were long because, unlike the other two, she did not nibble at them
when she was worried. When the fury of her attack caused her to drift away
from the plastic, she kicked at it, which sent her bouncing against the
opposite side, where she clawed and kicked again. With each bounce the fabric
of the pod stretched and bulged frighteningly, and the Sun bobbed over the
edge of the opaque section. Several times she collided with Miss Moore and
Mrs. Kirk, but accidentally, because she did not try to attack them. At least,
not until Mrs. Kirk tried to restrain her and got two long, red nail-marks on
her forearm for her trouble.
Cursing, Eglin planted his feet against the solid plastic of the services
panel and launched himself on an interception course. They collided softly and
awkwardly, rolling and bouncing along the plastic canopy until they ended in
the middle of the pod, spinning slowly together.
By that time Eglin was facing her and had a tight grip on both her wrists,
holding them against the small of her back. He was afraid for a moment that
she might use her knees on him, or take a bite out of his face with her even
and startlingly white teeth, but suddenly she relaxed against him and began to
cry.
"Nice try, Sampson," said Miss Moore furiously.
"Hysterics, a good old-fashioned wrestle, and then the dissolve into tears-the
oldest trick there is. But it isn't going to get you anything, Sampson,
because it's too damned hot in here as it is. Get away from him!"
"Jealous?" asked Mrs. Kirk.
But they were each gripping one of Miss Sampson's shoulders and pushing Eglin
away with their free hands. He realized, not for the first time since they had
been flung away from Eurydice together, that he was living in a
wish-fulfillment dream but that, for all the good it was doing him, he might
just as well be living in a monastery.
"All right, all right," he said in a tone, which said it most decidedly was
not all right. "If you can't sleep and won't stop nagging at each other, let's
do what the man says and try a little intellectual exercise - guessing games."
He flung out an arm in an angry wave that encompassed the pod, the people in
it, and the whole of creation outside, and said, "I'm thinking of something
beginning with ... with S."
"Sagittarius," said Mrs. Kirk.
"The ... the Sun," said Miss Sampson.
"Obviously," said Miss Moore.
"If you can't see the constellations as I've described them, don't change the
attitude of your pod. Spin yourself very slowly inside the transparent section
and watch the stars until you see the proper formation. That way uses less
energy and produces much less heat."
In Pod Three, the situation was somewhat different.
A hypothetical observer armed with a very accurate thermometer would have said
that the internal temperature was fractionally cooler than that of Pod Five.
A psychiatrist would have been worried sick.
Kirk drifted like some lumpy, organic airship over the services panel,
permanently tethered to it by one fat, hairy hand. His eyes never seemed to
leave Mrs. Mathewson, who floated at the other end of the pod.
The only times he did not watch her was when Stone managed to drift between
them, which was as often as possible.
There were no guessing games, no quizzes, no group intellectual exercises of
any kind in Pod Three. When Kirk spoke, he broke a silence, which had lasted
for six hours.
"Why does he talk to the kid so much?" he complained. "The boy is a special
case, I know, but Mercer could surely give someone else the benefit of his
individual attention. There is more than one survivor, you know."
It was a reasonable complaint compared with some of the others he had made
earlier, and his tone was conciliatory-as if he were trying to start a
conversation, which would not end in a bitter argument. Mrs. Mathewson brushed
away the hair that was clinging wetly to her face and said, "I think he's
trying to teach and help all of us, as Mr. Stone said, and is pretending to
teach only Bobby so as not to offend the others by making it too simple for
them."
She looked from one man to the other, trying to bring them together and
pleading silently with Stone not to make things worse. But Stone was not
looking at her and so could not hear the silent pleading.
"You're cheating on the food, Kirk," he said. "We aren't getting our fair
share."
"You don't need a fair share," said the other man.
"A skinny runt like you needs to eat hardly anything."
"I've always wanted to try a crash diet," said Mrs. Mathewson, still trying to
pour on some verbal oil, "and never had the nerve. But now-"
"Inside every fat man," said Stone, still not looking at her, "there is a
skinny slob who let himself go."
"Please," said Mrs. Mathewson, "please stop fighting over the food!"
Stone drifted slowly around to face her. He said, "Use your brain, woman.
We're not fighting over the food."
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. As you know, we are following
Eurydice's original course, which during the next few days will make its
closest approach to the Sun. Let me assure you that the temperature will not
rise above bearable limits, even in the pods which are overcrowded, provided
you remain at rest and do not generate unnecessary heat. The food supply is
adequate; it is simply that its lack of bulk makes you think that you are
starving, and the elevated temperature is also causing a rapid loss of weight.
"Think of the situation like this. Taken as a whole, the Earth is also
overcrowded and underfed, and firm control is needed if the available
resources are not to be wasted and the population is not to perish of its own
pollution or by too much self-generated atomic heat. You people are all facing
the same problems on a greatly reduced scale, and some of you are having to
adapt to situations which rarely, if ever, occur on Earth -social imbalance,
conflict, a small-scale war may even seem to be unavoidable. But a war will
kill everyone in your tiny plastic world just as surely as it would decimate
your home planet. You must avoid fighting at all costs.
"Remember that you are human beings and not animals, and keep control."
In Pod Fourteen control was easy, if slow. Mathewson knew exactly how to
change the attitude of his vehicle, and he was learning how to line up the
dividing line between the clear and the opaque material with groups of stars
when Mercer gave the order. He was hungry, but not very, and he was not
uncomfortably warm even with his uniform and cap on. Fourteen's life-support
system, catering as it was for one young boy instead of three adults, was
keeping him comfortable.
Mercer had given him permission to strip if he wanted to, but had warned him
against exposing his skin to the Sun. That way he could get a very serious and
uncomfortable burn. According to Mercer, the only space-tanned astronauts were
the ones who appeared in TV plays. Real spacemen avoided the Sun, and if one
of them got burned, it was a mark of sheer carelessness. A good spaceman
learned to control himself as well as his ship, Mercer had said, and keep his
mind busy and alert. Space was a very beautiful, but a very lonely and
dangerous place, if one did not keep control.
Mathewson knew that he did not always keep control. Sometimes he wanted to
play some other game than this one of Spaceman, which never stopped. At such
times he tired of memorizing stars and doing practice runs over the tiny
control panel, or crawling inch by inch along the plastic to keep a certain
star exactly in position. But he could not change the game, and he couldn't
even stop playing it.
Sometimes he wondered if Mercer knew when he lost control and started shouting
to fill up the emptiness, or crying because there was nobody near him. After
he had cried the first time, Mercer had explained to someone in another pod
that there were psychological and technical reasons why he could not arrange
two-way contact with separated husbands and wives and loved ones. He had said
that arguments within the pods were hard enough to control without risking
them starting between the capsules, and also, the passengers were becoming so
widely scattered that his receiver's speaker could not be turned up loud
enough to energize his transmitter mike, which was on a bulkhead several feet
away.
But Mercer could not have heard him crying because he had not changed-he had
not called him a good boy or praised him or talked soppy. Mercer had started
by treating him like one of the crew and had not changed at all, so he must
have been busy at something else when Mathewson was crying or shouting. As the
commander of this spacecraft, he should not be caught crying, and he should
stop doing it before his luck ran out and Mercer caught him at it.
But sometimes when he awoke with no bed or blankets around him, just warm air
and plastic and very faraway stars, he got frightened and couldn't help it
because he wanted his mother.
"Attention, attention. I have received a signal that Eurydice will blow in
approximately three minutes. Whatever you are doing, cover your eyes at once.
Keep them covered for at least thirty seconds after the flash. Do not, I
repeat, do not try to watch it through your goggles or peak at it between a
crack in your fingers.
"If you look it could be the last thing you will ever see."
While he was speaking, Mercer pushed the Captain's bunk into its recess and
shut the airtight flap.
Between the metal of the bunk, the bandages, and the damaged eyes, which might
not be capable of registering light anyway, Collingwood was adequately
protected from the flash. Mercer covered his face as he had told the
passengers to do because Prescott had told him to do it, but in much more
pungent language.
Despite his hand and his tightly closed eyes behind it, he saw the flash as a
bright, pink blotch, which faded very slowly.
When he uncovered to look outside he saw a beautiful, spherical aurora
writhing and expanding to fill all of space. The radio brought in a deafening
rattle of static, and the radiation level was climbing steadily.
While he had been relaying Neilson's warning, Prescott had said that the
reactor's safety devices had kept the cork in too long, and that it would be a
big one - possibly the biggest nuclear explosion so far - but they should be
safe. Mercer hoped that the First Officer was not simply trying to be
reassuring.
Chapter XV.
Through the window of Brannigan's office the recovery ship stood against the
sky like a narrow white pyramid wrapped in the red lace of its service
gantries. There were no signs of activity on or around it, but that situation
could be changed within a few minutes. The decision would be his alone, and he
should take it now instead of pretending that it would be arrived at by the
democratic process of listening to advice. Brannigan swung away from the
window to stare along the center of the table which joined his desk like the
vertical bar of a fat, grey T.
To nobody in particular he said, "We're wasting time."
"I disagree," said Perkins. "It is less than thirty-five minutes since
Eurydice blew."
"That bird out there costs nearly twice as much as the lost ship," said
Musgrave; then he added apologetically, "As the company accountant I'm
supposed to remind you of things like that before you throw good money after
bad."
"He has a point," said Beck. "The delayed blowup will not hurt anyone, but a
lot more delay will be caused while making sure that untrained passengers
point themselves properly at the rendezvous point, plus, of course, (he time
needed to get there. I can place that bird within one thousand meters of their
rendezvous beacon, but will there be anyone there to rescue? We really should
wait until we have their report on the consumables."
"We might wait a long time," said McKeever in his dry, lecturing voice. "The
blast has converted Eurydice into a rapidly expanding zone of radio
interference-rather like a spherical Heaviside Layer- through which we, with
our high-powered equipment, can punch a signal. But they don't have the power
to answer us until the volume of interference has enlarged and become so
diffuse that their signal and that of rendezvous beacon, if it still exists,
can get through."
"The shortest estimate that I can give for the clearance of this radio fog is
three days," McKeever went on, "and it seems to me that Beck cannot simply aim
at the center of the explosion because Neilson used a crude steam jet, whose
angle and thrust are not known with accuracy, which caused Eurydice to move
ahead and probably veer off course. If we are going for a late-evening launch
we will have to use the figures MacArdle gave us."
"But can we accept them for a launch as important as this?" asked Beck. "And
if the beacon has been taken out by the explosion, how will the passengers
find their way to the rendezvous point anyway?"
Dr. Lassiter cleared his throat. He said, "With one exception, I know these
officers very well indeed. You can accept MacArdle's figures. As for the
passengers making rendezvous without a beacon, you know that the medic has
been giving simple lessons in astrology and astro-navigation-coached by
Prescott and MacArdle, of course."
"Do you approve of Mercer?" asked Beck. "Does Prescott?"
"I do," said Lassiter, "and Prescott approves of nothing and nobody. But he
hasn't called Mercer incompetent, which is tantamount to an unsolicited
testimonial. The part that worries me, however, is the fact that the pods will
arrive at the rendezvous point dangerously low on air, and the two overloaded
capsules in an even worse condition. That ship out there is fast, but we've
had to wait a long time while Eurydice made up her mind to blow, and the
survivors are very far away now. My figures aren't as accurate as Beck's, but
I'd say that if we don't launch as soon as possible there will be an awful lot
of freshly-asphyxiated corpses at the rendezvous point."
Dr. Lassiter represented the softest science in the room, which was why he
tended to worry more about the space-going software.
"That's it," said Brannigan abruptly. "We try for a rescue."
With the decision taken-apparently by democratic process-Beck communicated it
to the launch crew. Any remaining questions would be those of policy, and
where policy was concerned, Brannigan was a dictator.
"If we go for a rescue," said Westgate suddenly, "we will have to say a lot
more about the disaster. What do I tell the media?"
"Nothing," said Brannigan. "The first major accident has occurred to a
passenger-carrying spaceship, the passengers and ship's officers are safe in
their survival capsules, and a rescue operation already formulated to meet
this contingency has been put into effect Nothing more until we know whether
or not it is successful."
Westgate's objections were smooth as a good PR man's should be, and not
immediately identifiable as objections. He said, "Yes, of course. There have
been no fatalities as yet, and there is no reason to worry the next-of-kin
until they actually occur. At the same time, we are going to be held
responsible for this disaster by the public, even though we can show that it
was a vendor company who was really to blame. Unless we focus a lot of
unwelcome attention elsewhere for a while-long enough for us to work out
satisfactory answers to a number of very awkward questions-we could take an
awful pasting from the press and TV.
Those boys hate like hell to have anything kept from them.
"This is the first disaster of its kind," Westgate went on, "and it has
everything. The Captain injured, perhaps dying, and unable to direct the
survival operation. One pod with a kid in it trying to do the-job of three
men. The conditions inside the pods while they were waiting for Eurydice to
blow, the heat and hunger and overcrowding, the strangers thrown together into
conditions of intimacy, and the imbalance sex-wise. It is the biggest
cliff-hanger since Apollo Thirteen. There would be no problem in slanting it
to make us look like heroes instead of villains, and to handle it so that the
majority of the media people will feel obligated to us for life..."
The others joined in, arguing with Westgate and putting up alternative
suggestions. Everyone seemed to have the idea that public relations, like
writing, photography and painting, was a job that could be performed just as
well by amateurs. Doctor Lassiter sat staring silently into the far distance
at fragile plastic bubbles full of hot, stale and stinking air, and thinking
of the people who were being forced to breathe it. Brannigan was staring into
the same area of space.
"Checking sequence initiated on booster rings Two, Three and Four," said a
voice from the speaker on Brannigan's desk. "Checks completed on tanks A and B
on ring One and fueling under way. Minus eleven hours and thirty-seven
minutes, and counting..."
Everything looked so normal and peaceful. Mercer thought resentfully as he
tried to dry the perspiration from his face with even wetter hands. The
vaporized plastic and metal that had been the ship had cooled and scattered
into invisibility, and only the deafening rattle of static on the pod
frequency was left-that and the radiation indicator, which was rapidly
slipping back to normal.
He had turned down the volume on the pod frequency because the voices he heard
were either lost in the mush or were all talking at once. So as not to feel
completely useless, he spent some time helping the Captain, stripping him of
all but his bandages to make him feel as comfortable as possible, and
reinforcing his sedation. Then he drifted back to the canopy to think and
sweat and look at the stars.
Static erupted thunderously from his speaker, with a whisper of intelligence
trying to fight its way through the din. Mercer gritted his teeth and moved
closer.
"Prescott. Come in. Mercer."
"Mercer here. Go ahead."
"Prescott. Come in. Mercer. Try to ... against the mike and ... be able to
hear you."
Mercer put his lips within an inch of the mike and acknowledged at the top of
his voice.
"Better. Now listen carefully and ... for a repeat if you don't ... MacArdle
says that this muck -will clear over the next few ... will allow pod and
segment frequencies to be worked in about two hours, but twoway contact with
Eurydice Control will not be possible for at least ... But they know what to
do without me telling them. Our job is to get the pods headed back ...
possible after the segments are on their way, I will link you to ... your
instructions.
"In case you're thinking that it's wrong ... passengers should go first. We
must ... rendezvous first to help look for them ... on stragglers. If you
understand ... to MacArdle."
"I understand," Mercer shouted," and a new voice began fighting its way
through the interference.
"MacArdle. The Beacon was taken out by the blowup so ... the hard way. Your A
thrusters are set below the floor-grill center line. When you fire make ...
you are diametrically opposite ... occupied by the Captain so that ... weights
will be equally distributed about your center of thrust. Have you got that?"
"Yes," bellowed Mercer.
"You won't be able to see the sky in your direction of thrust because of the
segment configuration, and neither will the pod people because their services
module will be in the way, so you will have to establish attitude from points
at right angles to your proposed line of flight. You will ... sitting position
with your back to the seal and sight along the top edge of the third line of
bunks. The glare-shield supports will give you a second referent and ... lower
half of Orion projects from the right into your canopy field of view just
above the center line. Below ... Sinus on the opposite edge of the canopy and,
although you won't be able to see it from that position, if you lean to the
left you will have Aldebaran and above it the Pleiades as a check. Do ...
repeat that?"
"No."
"You understand ... a first approximation and that , .. more accurate attitude
checks later. Is there any other information you need?"
"No, thanks," yelled Mercer, and added, "you seem to have a photographic
memory where my segment is concerned. Were you a patient in it?"
"Detailed structural data ... in the Captain's segment. Prescott worked out
the sighting arrangements. But now you must get your segment lined up with ...
me know when you're ready for the first attitude check."
"I'll give you a shout."
"That's very good. Doctor."
"Prescott. Stop chattering, you two. MacArdle, Neilson next. Mercer, you know
what you have to do."
While Mercer sweated at changing the attitude of his segment he could not help
looking at the locked control panel set above his couch. Like the other crew
segments, there was provision for making rapid and accurate changes of
attitude, but anyone who was not a trained astronaut could very easily send
his vehicle spinning helplessly out of control if he tried using anything but
the pre-measured A and B thrusters. Prescott had not even mentioned the
possibility of his being able to fly the vehicle, much less forbidden him to
do so.
The radio interference had faded a little as he worked. When Mercer turned up
the volume on the pod frequency he could make out a babble of voices through
the static. Apparently they were now close to the center of the expanding
sphere of interference, and signals could get neither in nor out. But the
sphere was hollow, and the people inside it could talk to each other and would
be able to do so with less and less trouble as time went on.
He heard every word that MacArdle spoke while he made the tiny movements which
placed the segment into its pre-burn position. He held himself still as
instructed, making sure that the segment was not drifting off the line. But
when MacArdle spoke again he could not move at all, and for several minutes he
could not even speak.
"MacArdle. Acknowledge, Mercer. Have you got trouble?"
He could actually feel the globules of sweat growing on his skin, making his
hands slippery and his back skid along the lock seal. He shook his head
violently, and the newly-dislodged perspiration drifted before his face and
tasted salty when he breathed it in. The stars burning coldly though the
canopy were suddenly a mass of incomprehensible lights with no recognizable
order or meaning, the imaginary lines which linked them together gone, so that
he did not know what he was seeing.
Mercer had thought that he could not feel more afraid than he had in the
howling, steam-filled chaos of the passenger compartment of Eurydice, but he
had been wrong.
"I ... I don't think I've got this right," he said finally.
There was a silence which stretched for an eternity, but which could only have
lasted a few seconds. Mercer wondered if MacArdle would speak, or if Prescott
would cut in with some pointed and abrasive comment. He could just imagine
what the First Officer was thinking about him now.
"MacArdle. You seemed to be doing fine until a Jew minutes ago-I mean, the
Pleiades and Sirius and Orion are pretty distinctive referents. But just try
to relax, drift forward to the canopy, and have a good look around to make
absolutely sure that you have the right constellations. Make sure you shield
your eyes from the Sun or you'll waste a lot of time waiting for your night
vision to come back. But take your time. Don't let me rush you, and don't push
the button because you're afraid or ashamed or because you want to put
yourself out of your agony. You must get it right first time."
Mercer's voice wouldn't work.
"Maybe the Captain can help you."
"The Captain is under sedation," said Mercer sharply, "and he can't see,
anyway. I would only be giving him something more to worry about. I'll go
forward and have another look around."
"1 was going to ask you to do that in any case, Doctor. We all have to
double-check on something as important as this. And remember, when you start
your burn give me a ten-second countdown so that I will know the exact time of
firing and the time you will have to fire your B thrusters at the rendezvous
point- otherwise you might go sailing past. And don't worry if there seems to
be nobody there when you arrive- we may be too widely scattered to see each
other without flares."
When the burn came, the sensation of weight was so strange that Mercer thought
he would drown in the softness of the bunk. In a few seconds it was over, and
he coiled and stowed the cable and remote-control switch, which had enabled
him to fire the thruster from his position opposite the Captain.
"Prescott. The sooner the pods are turned around the better. Mercer. You have
done most of the talking to them so far, and you may as well continue. How
will you handle it? Numerically?"
"Yes," said Mercer. "Taking them in numerical order will stop any argument
about who gets their instructions first-but there are exceptions. Two of the
pods are carrying four people and will run out of air before the others, one
of the threes is a potentially explosive situation, one may have a leak, and
nobody will object to the Mathewson boy jumping the queue-"
"I do. Mercer. Bringing back the pods that are in hazard first is a good idea,
but the boy can comfortably wait his .turn, or even come in last. He will not,
repeat not, run out of air and food."
"I understand," said Mercer.
"Good. Now go to work on the passengers. Don't waste time, but don't appear to
be rushing them, either. MacArdle will give you the referents for each pod as
you need them, and you will translate them to your passengers. I, ah, know
that you will appreciate their problems."
 Chapter XVI.
"One of us," said Stone, "is considerably heavier than the other two. Will
this swing us off course when we apply thrust?"
"Not very much. Three, but you may as well get it absolutely right and seat
the two lighter passengers closer together and facing the heavy one. But make
sure that your movements have not set up a drift away from your marker stars."
"You never miss a trick," muttered Kirk.
"Don't be so blasted sensitive," returned Stone. "I deliberately did not say
which of us was the fat one, and I very much doubt if Mercer remembers us.
Relax, Kirk-it was a purely technical question. Or is the thought of me
sitting close to the lady bothering you?"
"Don't tell me to relax in that tone of voice," said Kirk angrily. "You're
deliberately giving Mercer the impression that I'm ready to go berserk and
that all I can think about is women."
"You certainly haven't thought much about repositioning this thing," Stone
replied. "And don't move or we'll have to spend another half-hour getting the
right stars lined up. Be a good man and wait until after the burn before you
take a swipe at me."
"I didn't have to think about it, with a cool scientific mind like yours
directing the operation," Kirk said. "Or maybe you are just pretending to know
it all so that she will think you are some kind of scientist champion who
deserves, and intends to claim, his prize-"
"Shut up. Kirk."
"In a minute. I just want to remind you of a scientific fact. This overweight
body which you are always making cracks about, and which she tries not to look
at, has lived on Earth for fifty-two years. It has developed muscles to lift
and move itself around under one Earth gravity-pretty big muscles, though they
don't show-and in weightless conditions they will not be hampered very much by
the fatty overlay. Just remember that before you start claiming any prizes."
"Stop it," said Mrs. Mathewson, speaking for the first time that day. "Stop
fighting, and stop talking about me as if I was one of the food packs. You're
both old enough to have more sense. Besides, the lucky winner could not claim
his prize-if he tried we would all die of heatstroke."
"Attention, Pod Three. Are you stable and ready for thrust? Do you want to
recheck your attitude?"
"We have rechecked our attitude four times," said Stone, glaring at Kirk, "and
we're as stable as we're ever going to be. And anybody with half a brain knows
that if we haven't got it right, then we've no hope of reaching the-"
"Relax, Stone," said Kirk nastily.
"We're firing ... now," said Stone.
"Thank you. Three. I shall pass you the repositioning information in plenty of
time for you to fire the braking thrusters at rendezvous. Pod Four, come in,
please..."
The operation was smooth and fast on Pod Four, because Corrie had been
listening to Mercer's instructions to the other capsules and had already
worked out a close approximation of his pod's firing attitude, so that only a
few minutes spent on minor corrections were needed to position it accurately.
The relationship between Mercer and the astrophysicist during the exchange of
information was that of a pupil and a rather irascible teacher-and Mercer
wasn't the teacher. Corrie did most of the talking until the moment when he
pushed the thrust button and his wife made a sound that would have been a
scream if she had not been breathing in at the time, and pointed.
"Don't wave your arm about, dear," said Corrie, "or you will cause a deviation
in course. But I see what you mean."
"Having trouble. Four?"
"Just an unpleasant surprise," Corrie replied. "When we applied thrust the
sidewalls bulged outwards and the lock-section forward looked for a moment as
if it would come down on our heads. Actually, it approached by only a few
feet, and now that thrust has ceased, it and the sidewalls have returned to
normal. But you might have warned us that this would happen. That was
inconsiderate of you, Mercer."
Corrie waited for more than a minute, then said testily, "Mercer, did you hear
me?"
"I hear you. Four. Sorry about that. Was there any indication of a swing off
course when it happened?"
"No deviation," said Corrie.
"Good. Thank you, Four. Pod Five, come in."
As Corrie drifted away from the services panel, he wondered if he had detected
a note of strain in Mercer's voice. He was becoming very familiar with the
sound of the medical officer's voice because, like the occupants of all the
other survival capsules, it was the only outside sound that they heard. He
wondered why Mercer had waited before answering him.
Was Mercer irritated because a passenger had made a legitimate complaint at a
time when he was very busy?
Was he feeling as hot and uncomfortable as was Corrie, and panting in the
stinking, humid air as if he had just run a mile? Or was it simply that Mercer
had been talking so long, repeating the same instructions over and over again,
that he was going hoarse?
But there was no way of escaping Mercer's voice, so Corrie panted and sweated
and listened to the medic being patient with the stupid ones, and reassuring
with the frightened ones, and both at the same time with the majority of them.
The only consolation was that Mercer seemed to be speeding up the
process-while one pod was lining itself up on its marker stars, he had taken
to giving the next two pods their attitude instructions.
He ran into a slow patch between Pods Ten and Thirteen because the Sun
occupied the sky close to their markers on one side and the passenger wearing
the goggles could not see the stars clearly, while the others dazzled
themselves trying and had to wait until their night vision returned. Mercer's
voice was very loud during this period, probably because the pods concerned
were at extreme range for his radio.
Gome wondered why the other officers were not helping him, but then decided
that Mercer's radio was probably designed for this kind of work, and that it
was his duty to look after the survivors while the other supermen did what
they had to do about organizing the recovery. He had not spoken to any of the
other officers, and had seen two of them only briefly ,,. but he recognized
the type. They were the kind of men who were tops at their job-highly trained
and even more highly intelligent misfits who did not communicate easily with
normal people.
Corrie understood them very well because he was that kind of person himself, a
refugee in a do-it-yourself ivory tower.
Possibly the injured Captain had been less aloof.
Corrie had heard a few words which Mercer had not intended the passengers to
hear before the medic had remembered to switch off, so he knew that
Collingwood was unfit for duty. Which was a pity, because Collingwood, judging
by the way he had chatted with the passengers as they were coming aboard,
might have been able to mix socially during the voyage. Or it might be that
the crew were not allowed to have anything to do with the
passengers-especially female passengers-in the interests of discipline.
Except for the ship's medical officer, that is, who had acted like a glorified
steward and not at all like a superman until the disaster had occurred. He
could imagine the feelings of the other officers toward the one who had free
access, professionally and otherwise, to the passengers. They must have been
knotted up with envy, with people like the Moore girl undulating about the
ship. Or did they sympathize with him instead, looking down on him from their
control room monastery as a kind of worker-priest whose duties placed him in
the greatest danger of all, that of being blackballed out of the club if he
made a slip?
"Pod Fourteen, come in, Mathewson. Twelve and Thirteen will need a little time
to check their attitudes, and you may need even more because of your small
mass. I shall read your marker stars so that you can start lining up your
vehicle now and save time when I come back to you for the final checks. Ready
to copy?"
Corrie cursed the heat, and the air that would not stay in his lungs for more
than a second, but not loudly enough to interfere with the conversation going
on between Mercer and the boy. When he was physically or mentally
uncomfortable he had a tendency to lash out at people or, if they were not
within lashing distance, to think nasty thoughts about them.
It was quite possible that Mercer was passing on instructions from a book. The
medic's treatment of the boy was, on the surface, completely unsympathetic.
But Corrie knew that he was judging the situation by only one half of a
conversation. If he could hear the other half, he would know how thoughtless
Mercer was being towards the boy, or otherwise. Certainly there was no
indication, in the half which he could hear, that the boy was frightened or
hysterical or unable to handle the job properly. Perhaps Mercer's half of the
conversation was simply a ruse to fool the boy's mother into thinking that
everything was going well with her son. Maybe the majority of the instructions
to the passengers were like that; maybe most of the pods had actually been
unable to take up their proper pro-burn attitude and would never reach the
rendezvous point. Not everyone was as well-informed as Corrie, after all, and
even he could not be absolutely sure that he had done the job properly.
Corrie tried to bend his mind onto a more pleasant line of thought, an almost
impossible task with Mercer's voice dinning in his ear every few minutes. If
he could not close his ears, at least he could look out of this hot, stinking
hell at the cold, clear beauty of the stars. But the transparent plastic was
smeared with condensation in several places-the first time he had known that
to happen-and the only heavenly body he could see clearly was that of his
wife.
Viewed objectively, it was not a heavenly body in any sense of the word, but
then Corrie had been unable to regard it objectively in the thirty years he
had known it. In the beginning, when it had been rounded and firm and very
much younger, he had loved it so much that it had been impossible to feel any
objectivity about it, and when the years began to pass and the structure
changed and thickened as it adapted to the changes brought about by
childbirth, he had not wanted to be objective. Neither could he be objective
when the muscle tone began to diminish and his heavenly body had begun to sag
and wrinkle and grow lined under the triple forces of age, gravity, and grief.
He thought of their daughter on the way to that dance, impaled like a
beautiful butterfly on the steering column of her car-and decided that it was
much more pleasant to think about his wife and their present predicament. He
had gone after, and gained, a very j important post on Ganymede Base so that
his wife would be able, if not to forget, at least not to be constantly
reminded by well-meaning friends of the tragedy. She would keep herself busy
teaching in a technologically advanced village school with a dome over it, and
the prospect had already made her begin to relax. The absence of gravity had
smoothed out a lot of her wrinkles as well, and she was certainly looking much
better than she had for years.
Corrie reached out to touch her, then stopped. It was not simply that putting
his hot, moist hand on her would be uncomfortable for her and cut down the
area of evaporation; there had always been this hesitancy about the first
touch, the initial invasion of privacy. From the very beginning there had been
this shyness about wanting each other and an awkwardness about expressing
their feelings-as if some hypothetical listener would make scathing remarks if
they called each other by pet names. And so what had started as a joke to
cover his shyness had gradually become for them the language of love.
Like a dedicated astronomer taking up a lifelong study specialty, he had made
a close study of his heavenly body until he knew it thoroughly inside and out,
knew its powers of attraction and the serious perturbations it caused when, as
frequently happened, it made a very close approach and variations of the
two-body problem had to be worked out. But no matter what he did, or how
coldly scientific was his language at the time, the result was invariably the
same-two close binaries going nova together with the release of considerable
energy and heat.
"Heat," he whispered angrily, "is the newest four-letter word."
She opened her eyes and saw his hand a few inches from her face. Suddenly she
gripped it and pulled him towards her. They bounced softly together, and she
wrapped her arms tightly around his back before she spoke.
"I'm hot and sticky and not nice for you," she whispered between gasps for
breath. "I'm bothering you and it isn't fair, but I'm afraid. I can't breathe,
George. I'm... I think I'm going to die."
"Don't cry," Corrie whispered, smiling, "you'll increase the humidity. And you
aren't bothering me-it's too damned hot to be bothered."
"It isn't a joke," she said, desperation making her speak the first few words
aloud. "I'm suffocating. Every time I breathe out I don't know if I'll be able
to breathe in again. I can't stand it. My head is bursting and ... and I'm
drowning in here. I'm going to die, George."
"No you won't," said Corrie quietly. "Try to think of something pleasant, like
that time I stuffed the snowball down your neck. The heat is bad, but the
suffocating sensation is all in your mind. We have plenty of air,
remember-think of what it must be like in a pod with three or four people in
it."
He broke off, gasping for breath and with big black splotches jerking across
his field of vision. It had been too much to say in one breath, but he had
tried to do it because it had seemed the best way of proving to her that they
were not short of air.
A little later he went on, "Mercer has been talking to Pod Sixteen and nobody
else for the past twenty minutes, so he will soon be finished. When he stops
talking we can get some sleep. Try to relax. We have nothing to worry about
and plenty of air."
"Thank you. Sixteen. That completes the exercise, ladies and gentlemen. We
shall meet again at the rendezvous area in approximately six and a half days."
We hope, thought Corrie, then went on aloud, "Why don't you shut up and go to
sleep?"
"That was good advice, whoever it was who gave it. I agree; all of you try to
sleep. With one exception, Come in. Pod Four."
Startled, Corrie said, "Pod Four."
"We have been considering the incident-the only one of its kind to be
reported-which you mentioned during retro fire, -when your pod became
uniformly deformed while thrust was being applied. We think you have a
problem. Four."
"We care pretty sure that you have been punctured by one or more small
particles of the ship and that you have suffered a drastic, but obviously not
lethal, pressure drop. The drop has been so gradual that you may have
attributed your difficulty in breathing to the heat, but the sooner you repair
the leak, or leaks, the better, "You will find a tube of sealing compound,
clearly marked, in a recess in the services panel. If you can't read or
understand the instructions for any reason-- anoxia, impairment of vision,
anything like that-ask me. Otherwise do not waste time or oxygen acknowledging
my instructions.
"The punctures in the transparent section of your pod will appear as patches
of condensation. Closer examination will show that they are actually small
clouds of water vapor boiling off into space. Punctures in the opaque area
will be harder to find. Use empty food tubes, torn open and flattened. Cover
the opaque area systematically, using the opened tubes. The tube plastic is
thin and will stick to any point where air is escaping.
"Don't try to take a shortcut by covering a larger area with a piece torn from
a plastic screen. You could easily miss a leak that way, and the screen
plastic is tough-you must avoid wasting energy when the oxygen level is low or
you will pass out. Work carefully and thoroughly and with minimum effort. If
you haven't asphyxiated already, there should be ample time to plug the leaks
before you do, and then, of course, you won't."
Corrie was busy long before Mercer had finished talking, and he did not have
to ask for clarification or further instructions. He spoke only briefly to
give directions to his wife, and although they used minimum effort on the job,
they completed it feeling that they had been boiled in their own body fluids.
Corrie looked at their handiwork-six small blobs of sealing compound where
three tiny pieces of Eurydice had come and gone and wondered what it would
have been like to have been hit by one of those tiny, radioactive bullets. One
of them, if he remembered his position correctly when the explosion had
occurred, must have passed within inches of his head.
"Pod Four," he said. "Finished."
"Thank you. Four. Pressure will come up fairly quickly now, but I'm afraid the
news isn't all good. You have lost a lot of air and no longer have the fifty
percent safety margin which you started with. If you'll pardon the expression,
you are in the same boat as the other, three-passenger pods. But don't worry
about it. Rest and sleep as much as possible. That goes for everyone."
Corrie drifted, eyes closed and feeling fractionally more comfortable than he
had been for days, thinking about Mercer. The medic had known for hours that
Pod Four was leaking air-the pause when Corrie had complained about the sudden
flexibility of the walls during thrust had been Mercer reporting to the other
officers, no doubt. But he had not mentioned it to Corrie until the very end,
after the pods carrying four and then three people had been turned around-the
pods that would reach the rendezvous very short of air indeed. If they got out
of this, Corrie did not know whether he should compliment Mercer or punch his
face.
"The next time you tell me you're dying, dear, he said, "I'll believe you."
The voice of Mercer kept him from hearing his wife s reply.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen. The radio interference caused by the
ship blowup is beginning to fade, and we have had a signal from Eurydice
Control.
The recovery ship took off three hours ago; it is on course and estimating the
pick-up point in a little over a week. Now I'm going to sleep."
 Chapter XVII.
He was monitoring the pod frequency with the volume turned down, and all he
could hear was the faint hiss of interference and, very occasionally, a very
quiet voice complaining about the heat, the smell, the hunger, or the other
people in the pod. If something happened in the survival capsules, which
needed his attention, the quality and tone of the voices would change enough
to worry his subconscious into waking him up.
Mercer had never felt so tired in all the thirty-two years of his life.
But his fatigue was mental rather than physical-the only muscles that he had
used had been those controlling his tongue-and his brain did not have enough
sense to go to sleep easily. He had to go through it compartment by
compartment, switching off, powering down, forbidding it to worry or feel
guilty or responsible for situations and people over which he had very little
influence and no direct control. And he, too, had to try to forget the heat
and the hunger, when it was within his power to ease both conditions where he
personally was concerned.
Prescott, without actually forbidding him to use the individual
air-conditioning systems and stores for the bunks, had reminded him that he
would need to save as much power and consumables as possible for the transfer
of passengers to the recovery ship.
He tried not to worry about what might happen at the rendezvous-if his segment
reached it, or if the recovery ship reached it. There was nothing he could do
for the Captain, either-Collingwood's treatment was palliative rather than
curative. He could be of no real help to the passengers, either, except as an
eavesdropper who could head off a panic or potential fight by giving the
offending parties something else to think about. They were simply names and
voices to him, for the most part, because apart from the Mathewsons, Stone,
and Miss Moore, there had not been enough time to fix everyone in his memory
as individuals.
As Mercer drifted loosely above his couch, with the soporific hiss of
interference and the occasional murmuring of passengers' voices reinforcing
the humming of his own life-support equipment, it became increasingly
difficult to separate the real sounds from the ones he dreamed, and almost
impossible to tell them apart when his dreams began to use real sound effects.
But he could recognize the voices, even when they were slurred with fatigue,
distorted by anger, or segmented and separated by long, gasping pauses for
breath.
Dreamlike, the remembered voice of Prescott built itself up from the
background noises, telling him that the passengers could not possibly be as
short of air as they sounded-not even the ones who were four to a pod-and that
the gaspings were due to unnecessary exertion, heat, and thinking too much
about a shortage of air that had not happened yet. That, of course, was before
Mercer had reported the deformation of Pod Four during thrust and Prescott had
decided that the Corries' shortage of breath was actual rather than imagined.
Mercer had wanted to tell Four's occupants as soon as possible about their
trouble. Prescott had objected, saying that doing so would unsettle the
passengers who had not bees turned around by delaying their retro fire and
making them wonder if their own pods were not just a little bit soft. Telling
the Corries too soon could quite easily have brought on another six
emergencies just like theirs. When Mercer had continued to argue, Prescott had
ended by asking him to wake the Captain for a second opinion.
"No," said Mercer, because the Captain, dressed only in sweat-soaked bandages,
was feeling his way around the segment. Where Collingwood's spacesuit had not
pressed tightly against his skin, the decompression had caused capillary
bleeding and the blood had congealed, so that his face and neck were like one
great, livid bruise, and the same angry discoloration marched along his body
and limbs in broad, regular bands. He kept looking straight at Mercer with his
eye bandages and smiling and asking for a report and offering to help.
Mercer said "No" again, because it did not much matter what he said to the
Captain in a dream. He told Collingwood that he could do nothing to help if he
could not see, because Mercer's greatest fear was that he had misdirected the
segment so that they would never make rendezvous, and that the Captain's
instructions and those of Prescott would probably be in conflict. In any case,
the Captain was a patient, and doctors were not supposed to worry patients
with their physician's personal troubles when they had plenty of their own.
The Captain replied that he was dying from radiation poisoning even though
neither of them would admit it while they were awake, that he was so full of
sedatives that he was walking in someone else's sleep, and didn't Mercer want
company? Mercer insisted that the Captain would worsen even his dream
condition by moving around and talking, and that the radioactive material he
had inhaled could easily be dislodged and start burning another area of lung
tissue.
But the Captain remained hanging there, talking politely and refusing to
return to the bunk, which he could not possibly have escaped from in the first
place. Mercer wondered if he could dream him back into the bunk, or if he
would have to dream himself awake and push Collingwood into the thing. But if
he dreamed himself awake he might really wake up.
Mercer did not want to wake for as long as possible. Sleep was infinitely
precious-it short-circuited a few of the boring, anxious, sweating hours of
waiting for rendezvous and rescue, or for the realization to come that he was
off-course, with no hope of rescue. He would allow the Captain in his dream
provided Collingwood did not become too unpleasant-it would be a small enough
price to pay for sleep. But he could not help wishing that his dream did not
take over where his waking life left off.
Gradually, Collingwood's intent, bandaged face began to fade away, as did the
bunks and the segment structure behind it, and Mercer was hanging in
emptiness, rendered even more empty by the crowding stars. Voices were coming
out of the emptiness from a ring of tiny plastic globes, which hung like
effluviant bubbles in a black ocean.
"I can't. You know I never could sleep properly without you beside me-no,
George, you're too hot. Just ... just hold my hand until I'm asleep."
"Your tiny hand is sweating, let me-"
"You can't sing, George, and you're wasting oxygen."
"I agree," murmured Mercer, "on both counts."
"It's supposed to be cold and dark, they told us. But this ... it's like a
black inferno. I keep wanting to tear a hole in the plastic and climb out-it
would be worth asphyxiating just to be cool for a few seconds."
"Take it easy, Sampson. If you did that you wouldn't even have time to feel
cool. You would decompress, swell up and burst like a balloon stuffed with
porridge. You wouldn't look or feel nice at all."
"And you only have to look at Kirk herself to see what she means about
overstuffed-"
"There's no need for cracks like that, Moore-I was simply trying to keep her
from killing herself and us into the bargain. But maybe you would like to die,
too, because you have nothing left to live for. Even when you nudge against
Eglin he just pushes you away now. You must be getting desperate. Your
cheek-bones stick out, and as for your gorgeous figure, we can count every
rib. You're skinny, Moore, and you can't take it. That's the trouble with
beautiful and unstable creatures who live only for love-"
"Listen, Fatso, an overweight hog like you has no reason to talk about
psychological instability. You're not exactly an attractive sight yourself.
You've three times more skin than you need, and it flaps around like a-"
"You bitch. You can't leave me alone, can you? Well, just remember that three
can live and breathe more easily than four, and the next time you're drifting
about trying to nudge Eglin and you come near me, I'll-"
"Shut up, all of you! You're wasting air, and even getting angry generates
physical heat, so cut out the squabbling, ladies. If you want to do things,
lie quiet and think about doing them when we get back on the recovery ship,
where there will be enough food and cool, clean air to let us do them without
killing ourselves, right? If you think about it quietly, you will let me go to
sleep and dream about it. You might even go to sleep yourselves. As for you,
miss, I don't really believe that you would tear a hole in the skin, but your
long nails worry me. Why don't you chew them like I do. It's a good way of
augmenting your diet."
"Sensible man," said Mercer. "Always leave them laughing." He wondered
sleepily if biting the nails was in itself a mild form of cannibalism.
"Eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. Whi-i-n-n-g-g-g. Blam-blamblam, Kerpow. Eh-eh-eh- bo-o-om.
Charge!"
The Mathewson boy's capsule was having another war. It did not sound like
Indians this time, or bug-eyed monsters-arrows. Mercer knew from recent
experience, went whizz-thunk, and ray-guns simply hissed.
This sounded like a group of assault commandos of Second World War vintage in
the process of establishing a bridgehead on Pod Fourteen. Mercer did not
object either to the noise or the occupation, because it was much better than
listening to the boy trying not to cry for his mother, and the visitors were
not using up any of the food or oxygen. Besides, a battle of this magnitude
would soon make him hoarse, and the imaginative effort involved would put him
to sleep.
"He hasn't spoken for over four hours. Do you think our radio has packed up?"
"You worry too much. Saddler. He's probably sleeping. After all, he's only
human."
"You don't really believe that, do you? I wonder where they found such a cold,
unflappable, unemotional iceberg for a medical officer-"
"Poker, anyone? Whist?"
"We just finished a game. Can't you think of anything else, like what it would
be like if we had a girl in here?"
"We might not be able to do anything. I mean, | that's a game that only two
should play."
"Not always. It has been practiced as a group exercise on occasions."
"No dice. Saddler-Mercer would deliver a sermon, a much stronger than the one
he gave somebody three days ago, warning us about abusing the energy reserves
of our restricted worlds in the thoughtless pursuit of pleasure, and the doll
herself would probably remind us that she had a husband-seven feet tall and
broad in proportion-in another pod."
"But nobody could actually stop us, could they? I'm thinking about that
paragraph on page twenty-three of the emergency instructions where it says, in
effect, that any actions taken by survivors while adrift in a capsule are
beyond the jurisdiction of any planetary government. We could get away with
anything."
"Like cheating at cards?"
"Don't be ridiculous; some sins are unforgivable. But he might be right.
Saddler-we could be luckier than some of the others. A pack of cards doesn't
use oxygen, and if things get really bad we can always eat them."
"Gin rummy, then?"
"Try patience," said Mercer in his sleep. "That's the name of this game."
"I don't dislike either of you. Try to believe that and stop arguing over what
I probably think about you- I'm thinking none of those things. It doesn't make
any difference to me that one of you is fat and the other thin, even less that
one is polite and apparently thoughtful while the other is less so. I'm a PC
widow with a wide experience of being loved, hated, tolerated or ignored by a
man who changed personalities at will. The only good thing about you two, so
far as I'm concerned, is that neither of you change."
"That might not always hold true, m'am. In the grip of strong emotion, such as
love, even the most stable personality can undergo-"
"Say what you mean, Stone. Given the chance, you would be as much an animal as
any other man."
"That kind of personality change is normal in those circumstances and doesn't
worry me."
"I should think not. My wife wouldn't complain if I came home a different man
every night. What happened to him? Was he institutionalized, or did he get
airborne without a airplane?"
"Shut up. Kirk."
"It doesn't matter. You probably think it was fun. It was, in the beginning;
then he took PC only occasionally, when he had to meet an important client and
he thought it would help him swing the deal if he put on a complimentary
personality. But then he started taking them more and more often, and
experimenting, and for the last four years his personality was so fragmented
that it made him impotent. But he kept taking more, several different kinds at
once, trying to shock his mind back to normal. They told him that it didn't
work like that, but he wouldn't believe them. That -was how he died. At a
party, after taking five, one of which was a hallucinogen-it was that kind of
party. But he didn't commit suicide. Three of them got impatient to experience
the drug under free-fall conditions. They were holding on to each other all
the way to the pavement."
"Tough."
"Yes, indeed."
"It doesn't bother me now. But you see why 1 don't like or dislike either of
you, and why it is a waste of time fighting over me. Nothing could happen here
anyway, but perhaps if 1 came to know both of you better on the ship-"
"Stone might get to know you better on the ship, but I -wouldn't-my wife would
be there. And I'm not all that sure that we'll ever make the ship. That
sanctimonious medic is conning us, and you are likely to be the last woman I
will ever meet. My personality isn't very nice, but I'm likely to be the last
man you will ever meet. For obvious reasons I'm discounting Stone, who
probably couldn't-"
"Kirk, you're trying to start a fight again, and you'll get it-on the recovery
ship if 1 can wait that long-"
"Please. Please don't fight..."
"MacArdle," said Mercer urgently. "Neilson. Prescott. Wake up, MacArdle, and
listen to me. I have to try something but I need your help..."He went on
calling the Communications Officer, outlining what he had to do and asking for
instructions. But MacArdle did not answer, and all he could see was the
survival pod with Mrs. Mathewson and Stone in it, with a great organic
zeppelin without a face, which was Kirk. But then the picture began to fade,
and the supports of the bunk beside him began to show through. Something,
somebody, was waking him up, and he was actually glad. "... And if you insist
on babbling in your sleep, at least talk coherently! Mercer! Prescott here,
come in, Mercer."
"Mercer."
"I think I caught the general drift, but tell me again what you want MacArdle
to do, and why."
Mercer began by explaining that he still wasn't sure whether he had overheard
some pod conversations or merely dreamed that he had, and when Prescott curtly
informed him that he had overheard the same conversations, his tone became
even more demanding. Without giving Prescott a chance to speak again, he
concluded, "... I've been listening to them and understand the type of
personalities involved. With that background of PC trouble with her husband,
she can't help feeling the way she does; but the other two should not, in
those conditions, be told that she has no strong feelings either way for them.
If she said that she preferred one, fine- they might have a token scrap and
some bad language. They might even injure each other proving who was the
better man. But telling them that they are just the same in her eyes-well,
they have both got to prove to her as well as themselves that they are not the
same, and before they do I have to get over there and stop it..."
"Negative. Absolutely not. The segment's and pods are all, we hope, heading
for rendezvous. Making course corrections to bring your segment alongside
Three is a much too complex operation at this stage."
"But MacArdle had the return courses ready as soon as we needed them. He must
have a computer that could easily-"
"You've got one just like it. Mercer, but you've spent your life programming
it with medical data. The answer is no."
"But they'll kill each other."
"Talk them out of it. Mercer. There is nothing else you can do."
 Chapter XVIII.
His trouble was that he could not talk to the passengers as individuals, even
though, on many occasions during the days which followed, he was sorely
tempted to do so.
On Pod Three, it was Mrs. Mathewson who did most of the talking, as she, too,
tried desperately to keep the peace. He learned an awful lot about her from
the things she said-about the life she had so recently led, the pressures she
had been under, and the difficulties of bringing up her son in a home that was
all too often a madhouse. Other survivors revealed things good and bad about
themselves, but Mercer's interest in them and his concern for their welfare
was professional-Mrs. Mathewson and her boy he was beginning to like. If he
wasn't very careful, he could find himself acquiring a ready-made family.
It was a ridiculous, if pleasant, thought, which seemed to come to mind much
more often when he was asleep than awake, and on some of those occasions he
was able to do much more than talk to Kirk and Stone. One of the first things
he usually did was to forget his Hippocratic Oath, lose his temper, and begin
making medical repair work for himself.
He had to remind himself that they were three reasonably normal, civilized
people, who would not have dreamed of hurting each other in ordinary
circumstances, and that he had better keep reminding them of that as often as
possible.
The trouble was that he could not talk to them directly, although it could be
done very easily by calling for silence from everyone else and talking frankly
about their situation. But then he would remember that while the frank
discussion was going on between the occupants of Pod Three and himself,
everyone else would be listening to his half of the discussion-including the
Mathewson boy and Kirk's wife. Mercer did not want the boy to hear the sort of
things Kirk was saying to his mother, even at second hand, and open discussion
might easily be the cause of violence in Pod Five as well. The trouble in Pod
Three, like a virulent disease, had to be contained.
So he talked to Three in general terms, telling cautionary tales, drawing
comparisons between pod conditions and those on the overcrowded Earth,
stressing the importance of self-control and the necessity for eking out the
available resources for as long as possible. When the reactions from the
pods-not just from Three-told him that he was beginning to anger them with his
preaching, he changed his approach and began talking psychology, discussing
the well-known fact that individual members of certain species, when
threatened with death or a lesser danger, sometimes displayed a tendency to
seek to prolong their lives through their offspring, either by protecting them
against the danger or by seeking to produce more of them. This urge toward
species immortality was an animal instinct which reasoning beings could easily
overcome.
From that he moved to debating. More accurately, he answered at length
questions that had never been asked. The survivors could not hear anything but
his side of the debate, so they did not know who asked the questions Mercer
was answering, and when some of them asked good questions of their own, he
sometimes tried to answer those, too. But when the questions were difficult or
potentially unsettling, he pretended that too many people were talking at once
and that he had not heard them.
He knew from their reactions that most of them knew he was getting at someone,
and speculation regarding the identity of the unknown offenders was rife and
served to keep their minds off the heat and hunger for several days. In Pod
Three they knew who Mercer was getting at, but Kirk and Stone had stopped
talking, or even cursing at him, and Mrs. Mathewson seemed to realize that
nothing he could say at a distance of several hundred miles would be able to
help her. That made two of them.
"Some of the passengers consider me a nuisance," he told Prescott during his
next report, "others a constant irritant and a bore, while most of them show
active dislike. But on Pod Three ... Well, everything I say now, on whatever
subject, makes them angry with me and each other-the men that is. There's
going to be bloody murder in that pod if someone doesn't make them see sense.
Do you think you, as the most senior officer, could talk to them and-"
"I know I couldn't. Mercer. "Nor could Neilson or MacArdle-we aren't
programmed for that sort of thing. How is the Captain?"
"Still out. If I allowed him to regain full consciousness he would be
confused-I'd have to explain everything that has happened in detail to him-and
in considerable pain. It would not be fair to him, and he might not be
sufficiently well to sound authoritive enough to quell the people in Three.
But then I can't, either, and the reactions of the other passengers-"
"Are you worried by what they think of you. Mercer? Don't be. I've listened to
some of the things they've called you-several varieties of sanctimonious
unprintable, a blasted nag where conservation is concerned, a cold-blooded,
imperturbable zombie who apparently can't even treat a boy with kindness. But
why go on. I'm beginning to feel proud of you. Mercer."
"Thank you, I think."
"However, I can help by giving your people something else to think about.
MacArdle has computed the attitudes for the rendezvous retro burn, but it will
involve you giving the passengers another lecture. I'll give you the
positions, marker stars and firing times in numerical order, beginning with
your own, which will be first. Are you ready to copy?"
"Ready," said Mercer.
"Before I give you the data, explain to them-in your words, not mine-that for
this burn the attitude is not as important as the timing. They must check
their velocity as close as possible to the rendezvous point. If they make a
small error in attitude, it will cause only a correspondingly small lateral
drift, and we will be able to keep them in sight and pick them up when the
recovery ship arrives-that is, of course, assuming they have not made a major
attitude error, which will take them wide of the recovery area. If they burn
their B thrusters too soon or too late, they will stop short or overshoot, and
we may not be able to find them without the recovery ship's radar, and by then
their air could be gone. Do you want me to repeat this?"
"No."
"The first burn, yours, will take place in a little over five hours. The two
four-person pods will follow, then the remainder in numerical order, with the
last few having nearly a day to practice their positioning maneuvers. With
luck, a fair number of pods will be converging towards visual contact shortly,
which should also give your people something pleasant to think about.
"Your burn will occur at twenty-two zero six, and your marker stars are..."
During the hours that passed before Mercer had to make his burn, the reactions
from the pods ran the gamut from wild excitement to the listlessness of utter
despair. But morale improved considerably when Pods Ten and Twelve reported
seeing another pod, which meant that they were seeing each other. Mercer did
not tell them that to see each other so soon meant that one or the other was
considerably off course.
When the time came for him to apply thrust he had not seen anyone else, even
though the other three crew segments had reported seeing each other and should
have been within easy visual range of him. Mercer tried to consider the
possibility that he was off course, lost, and for a few minutes so great was
his panic that he could not even think. But then he began to feel angry as
well as afraid, angry with MacArdle for giving him such precise instructions
when, if Mercer had not carried out the repositioning properly a week earlier,
this present exercise was a sheer waste of time. He surprised himself by
making the final attitude check and pressing the thrust button precisely on
the pip. But when he moved to the canopy to make another desperate search of
the stars for the three segments, the fear returned. He wondered again if he
should rouse the Captain, if it would be fair to wake Collingwood only to
explain that, due to an error on Mercer's part, they were lost and were going
to die. It might not be fair, but was it right? Did anyone have the right to
put a man to sleep, then make the condition permanent without first waking him
to tell him so? Maybe he would hate Mercer for waking him, but perhaps there
were things that Collingwood wanted to remember for a while before he died.
There was that startlingly beautiful ground hostess who was the Captain's
wife, possibly children, other experiences and people...
"Where the hell are you?" Mercer shouted.
"Prescott. Steady, Mercer. We could ask the same of you. Try lighting a
flare."
Keeping his eyes covered to retain his night vision, Mercer ejected a flare,
not daring to hope.
"We have you. Mercer. MacArdle says that from your position we should be
midway between Triangulum and the Square of Pegasus, in visual range now that
you know where to look. Well?"
"I see you," said Mercer after a few minutes. With thousands of stars all
around him, the arrival of three small and not particularly bright additions
had not been easy to detect. "Can I get closer?"
"Yes, by using your flares for thrust. You ignite them without pressing the
eject button. This causes them to burn inside their launcher, giving ten
seconds of very weak thrust. But it isn't necessary to come closer. We can
expect some pretty wild shooting from the passengers and having you out there
to look for stragglers could be an advantage, and the recovery ship might come
to rest closer to you than us."
"I understand."
"It's nice seeing you, Mercer. Now you had better attend to Pod Five."
On Pod Five, Eglin had passed out from heatstroke, and the three girls had
positioned the capsule and applied thrust. Mercer did not see their burn, nor
those of Pods One and Two, but they were spotted by the other segments and he
relayed the good news to their occupants. Several passengers reported
excitedly that they could see other pods, and. Mercer spotted one drifting
almost directly between himself and the dim constellation of artificial stars
that was the other three crew segments. He did not know who it was until its B
thruster burned outwards like a fiery spear precisely on the second listed for
Pod Three.
"I see you, Three," said Mercer, almost laughing with relief. "Nice shooting."
"Stone here. I'm not just a pretty face, you know.
But this little miracle of astrogation is going to cost someone. Mercer."
"Fine," said Mercer, laughing. "Company rules forbid the carrying of
intoxicating liquor, but if you wouldn't mind a few ounces of diluted surgical
spirit, I'd be glad to-"
"He doesn't want to be paid off in hooch, stupid."
"That was Kirk, Mercer. Ignore him; he isn't responsible for his glands."
"Don't you patronize me, you ... you gentleman-"
"Please don't fight. We're nearly safe now. Please. Doctor, talk to them."
There was nothing that Mercer could say that-would do any good, so he said
nothing. There was very little that he could do, but he did it.
"Prescott. Are you in trouble. Mercer? There is evidence of a discharge of gas
from your vehicle."
"No, sir. I used two contained flares to move towards Pod Three-"
"I told you to stay put!"
"Yes, sir. But a very serious problem could arise on Three if something isn't
done quickly, and it is in my province. I guessed that you might object, and I
decided that it would be better-less prejudicial to discipline, that is-if I
were to be chewed out for. using my initiative rather than for disobeying
orders."
"That was considerate of you, Mercer. I suppose you consider mutiny just
another exercise of individual initiative? Don't answer, I'm too busy just now
to listen. Neilson will tell you what to do if you ever get where you're
going."
Before Prescott switched off. Mercer could hear MacArdle reading out the
numbers for what he called his final approximation of position, while another
voice, sibilant with distance and intervening interference, was reminding
Prescott that the survival pods were nearing their limit of duration and
suggesting ways by which the passengers could save energy and air. The voice
from Earth was speaking as if it was surrounded by mikes and TV cameras, which
was probably the case, and Mercer hoped that Prescott would give the
ground-bound medic instructions on what to do with his elementary and
unoriginal suggestions.
The flares had not given his segment much of a push, so that it would take
five hours for him to reach Pod Three-if he did not go wide. He had three
flares left, two for deceleration and one to light if he got lost. It was
extremely difficult to listen to the sounds from Pod Three without thinking
too much about what might be happening there, but he tried. The voices from
the other pods helped.
"Pod Four; Corrie, at rest. I have two others in sight."
"I can see someone! Pod Six here. Shouldn't we decelerate now?"
"Pod Seven. We can see a pod on a converging course. Who is it?"
"Mercer, the air is bad. When I look at the stars I keep seeing blotches. I'm
not sure if they're the right ones."
"Pod Five. Sampson. The others have passed out and ... and I'm going the same
way. The air indicator is as ... as near zero as makes no difference. Where
the ... hell's the ... recovery ship?"
"Prescott. I heard that, Mercer. Tell her there is a safety reserve and to
relax. Make it sound convincing. I'm going after them myself, estimating
contact in five and a half hours. Is there anything special I should remember
about reviving heatstroke and asphyxiation cases?"
"I can't breathe, George."
"Crowded all of a sudden, isn't it? I can see three of them, all drifting past
us. It's like ... Oh God, no. We're moving past them; we're going right past
them. Saddler here. What's happening to us...?"
"Prescott. I see them. Mercer. Their attitude was badly off-they killed only a
fraction of their inwards velocity and are shooting away from the rendezvous
area at a fair clip. MacArdle, go after them before they get too far away.
Mercer, tell them to relax and play some more poker."
"Pod Fourteen; Mathewson. When will I be able to see something, Mercer?"
"Pod Nine here. We're due to decelerate soon but we still can't see anyone.
Are ... are we lost?"
"I don't think that I'm the sort of man he keeps telling you I am-I'm pretty
sure I'm not. But I don't know for sure, and I don't want to hurt you. Even
under this blubber I'm a big man, you know, and ... Well, you've heard of the
expression 'laugh and grow fat.' I think that fat people have to laugh to keep
from crying or breaking things, and small people keep jumping about and
prodding people so's everyone will know they're there..."
"Watch it. Kirk."
"... in noise what they lack in size. But they're lucky in some ways. They are
better engineered, less susceptible to component failure like bad hearts and
gummed-up arteries, and there are always plenty of small, good-looking women
for them. Unless you've plenty of money or you put on weight after you're
married, nobody will look at you but fat women. Just once, before I die, 1
would like to be loved by a beautiful slim girl with a nice disposition and
... Well you know."
"I understand, Mr. Kirk. But we aren't going to die and that wasn't, well,
isn't, how I'd describe myself. I'm a bag of skin and bones."
"Ignore him, m'am. On you, skin and bones look good."
"Damn you. Stone. You always have to say the right thing."
"Kirk, what are you doing...?"
The fight started then, and Mercer would not reach them for another three and
a half hours.
Chapter XIX.
He began by telling himself that it could not possibly last, that they could
not maintain the physical effort in an environment of a stinking plastic oven
full of rank air-but the fight went on and on with no audible indication of it
ever stopping. Then he began to worry about the heat they were generating and
the air they were using. Reminding himself that both men were suffering from
malnutrition and could well be as weak as kittens did not help much, because
the noises they were making suggested that they were fighting like tigers.
What they were doing was a physical impossibility for sane men, and insanity
like this had to be temporary. But temporary did not necessarily mean of short
duration.
The grunts and gasps, the low, monotonous cursing, and the wet thud of fists
or feet against slippery, sweating flesh went on. Mercer told himself that his
imagination was probably working overtime, that they were not seriously
injuring each other because in the weightless condition it was practically
impossible to kick or punch accurately and, if a blow should land, both
attacker and victim would bounce away unless they were holding each other
tightly-and if they were doing that they would not be able to punch or kick
effectively.
There was a sudden high, sharp squeal of pain.
"Stop it! Stop it! Look what you've done to his ear..."
Animal noises answered her. Probably they were making them at each other. But
there were other times when the noises became coherent words, when, between
the curses and grunts of pain, they became all too specific about what they
were going to do-what they were doing-to each other. So there were very few
blank areas in the mental picture that Mercer had of the interior of Three,
and those were usually filled by the anguished pleading of Mrs. Mathewson
trying to keep the two men from killing each other, and her as well.
"Ifs getting hotter! Stop it. Please stop it..."
Mercer heard another wet thud and a feminine cry, as Mrs. Mathewson tried
vainly to separate them; then another scream, followed by a continuous
whimpering and moaning, as one of the men sank his teeth into the other's
shoulder and had his eye clawed while he was tearing free. Mercer knew what
was happening because they kept talking and gloating about it, but he did not
know who was doing what because neither of the men's voices was recognizable.
Mercer had forgotten that in the weightless condition they could still use
fingers and teeth.
"Pod Ten. I'm having trouble again finding my markers. Is Arcturus supposed to
be level with the rod equator and Antares ten degrees above it, or have I got
it the wrong way around?"
"You have fifty minutes before your burn Ten," said Mercer sharply. "I'll come
back to you. Quiet, everyone, for Pod Three."
"Prescott. Forget Three, Mercer, and think about your other passengers. Give
Ten the information he needs. Right now."
"But those two are killing each other, and probably the girl, too. Listen to
them."
"I'm trying not to, Mercer. I advise you to do the same."
He could not forget Pod Three because the sounds on the capsule frequency kept
reminding him that the biting and clawing and gouging were still going on. But
suddenly there was a marked reduction in the noise and activity-maybe the heat
was getting to them at last and they were beginning to flag. With luck they
might both pass out from heatstroke, which meant that they would stop using so
much of the pod's air and all of the occupants might survive, even if two of
them did not deserve to.
There was just over two hours to go before he rendezvoused with Three, if he
was able to do so, and there might just be enough air for them to make it.
"You've won, you've -won. Let go of him. Can't you see you're strangling him?"
"I've won. No. And yes."
"But ... but you're not angry any more and you're still trying to kill him.
Let go. Let go of his throat."
"Keep off. I'll wrestle with you later..."
"Let go of him. Please let go ... Oh, my hair, my hair..."
"I told you to keep off..."
Listening helplessly, Mercer knew that things were quieter on Three because
one of its occupants was dead or unconscious. Now, he could hear heavy
breathing and the thud of blows being struck. Reminding himself that it was
virtually impossible to land heavy blows in the weightless condition did no
good, because he was remembering the girl's long, dark hair and imagining one
fist gripping a handful of it while the other pounded her into
insensibility...
"Pod Ten. Retro thrust completed and I can see two other pods. I think one of
them is close enough to wave Sit to."
"Save your energy," said Mercer dully.
The sounds from Three were taking on a new quality because the purpose of the
man making them had also changed. His world might only have minutes of life
left to it, and he, whichever of the two it was, intended enjoying them to the
full-the gasping, chopped-up monologue made that all too plain. But his
intentions, which would easily have been accomplished on Earth, where gravity
kept inanimate or unconscious objects in one place, in his present environment
required the active cooperation of both parties. But one of the parties was
unconscious and could not have cooperated even if she had wanted to, and he
was becoming angrier, hotter and more frustrated by the second, Suddenly his
breathing became stertorous. The sounds of cursing and the slapping contact of
his body against the plastic stopped. He began to make choking noises, and a
few seconds later he was making no sound at all.
Mercer swore horribly and turned up the volume on the pod frequency. The
segment was suddenly filled with the sounds of heavy, labored, gasping
breathing. It was coming from the fourteen other survival capsules and not, he
was afraid, from Pod Three.
"Prescott. I heard that, Mercer. You might be better advised to divert to Pod
Four. The Carries could be shorter of air than they realize. MacArdle will
give you the figures. Neilson will meet you and come aboard at Four-we'll need
to make some fast pickups by then, and for that we need fast and fancy
maneuvering."
"I have to check Three."
"I see. In that case, MacArdle wants you to observe ass your target pod
carefully so as to note the rate of apparent drift in the stars beyond it.
This will tell him how much you are off course and allow him to compute an
angle of thrust, which will compensate for it during deceleration. Neilson
will give you a rundown on the automatic docking sequence."
"I'm listening," said Mercer.
"When they've finished, you should check on the Captain's condition, if you
haven't already done so, You are going to be very busy for the next ten
hours."
"Will do."
But all at once Mercer did not want to check on Three's drift, nor did he want
to see proof of the things he had heard going on, even though the sight might
not be as bad as his imagination had pictured it. Pod Three was in all
probability a coffin which would never be opened-it might drift in space for
all eternity, beyond even the range of Gabriel's trumpet, unless he himself
went in and disordered the bones of its freshly dead.
There was no real need for him to open that stinking, plastic coffin. The air
must have been used up during that long, vicious fight, and a man who had
killed once by strangling his victim might lack the imagination during a
stress situation to vary his methods of coercion. Mrs. Mathewson could well
have been dead before her attacker had succumbed to the heat and asphyxiation
himself.
Mercer was no stranger to the sight of death, whether naturally occurring or
violent, but he was most desperately anxious not to see Mrs. Mathewson dead.
For the first time, he was able to understand why some people refused to look
at the bodies of even their nearest and dearest relatives. If one remembered
them only as they were when they were alive, then they still lived after a
fashion, because there was no real proof that their life had ended.
He could still call Prescott and change his mind. But then there was the boy
to think about. Young Mathewson might not be as good at playing spaceman as he
sounded. He might be headed wide of the rendezvous point and already condemned
to die. But he might not die; Mercer might have to tell him that his mother
had died, and he realized that, no matter how bad it was going to make him
feel a few hours from now, he had to be able to tell the boy that she had died
before he reached her pod.
While MacArdle gave him instructions, he checked on the Captain's condition
and made sure that the services in the other bunks were functioning. Then
Neilson's voice filled the segment, interrupted only by passengers saying that
they could see other pods, that their air was running out, that it was very
hot, and When would the recovery ship arrive? People, Prescott included, were
not giving Mercer much time to think, for which he was glad.
As his segment was closing with Three he wondered what he would do if there
was a survivor in the pod who was not the girl. He knew what he wanted to do,
but a rebel bunch of brain cells in his mind-a minority group, but one which
was steadily gaining converts- kept insisting that in different circumstances
Three's occupants might well have become good friends, that the twin disasters
of Eurydice blowing up and one of the three being female had subjected two
flawed personalities to the breaking strain-and that the innocent one, who had
given no indication of being flawed, had perished as well.
But the minority group would not accept that, and insisted on being stupidly
optimistic.
With MacArdle's help he found himself less than twenty yards from Pod Three
and drifting very slowly past it. Mercer had an air bottle and mask strapped
in position, another set drifting loosely at his elbow, and the inside seal of
the airlock already open. Through the window in the outer seal he could see
Three turning slowly end over end like a great fat cucumber which was half
silvered and half clear. In the transparent section he could see a motionless
tangle of plastic screens, clothing, food containers, and bodies floating like
strange fish in a pink-tinged, frozen ocean.
When Three's lock turned to face his position, he launched the automatic
docking cable; he watched its seeking head home onto the lock transmitter,
connect, and begin drawing the two vehicles together. As the cable shortened,
their difference in velocity set them spinning about their common center of
gravity. By the time the lock interfaces came together they were spinning
quite fast-not enough to blur the stars, but enough for Mercer to feel the
tugging of artificial gravity.
He checked that the passenger frequency was switched off and reported to
Prescott what was happening. Then he opened the connecting seals and went
through.
The centrifugal force was greater than he had expected, so that he dropped not
too lightly onto the services panel at the opposite end of the pod. It was
covered with a sexless tangle of arms and legs and plastic debris, and the
whole mess was splattered with the sticky red discs of congealed blood, which
a few minutes earlier, had been drifting weightless in the incredibly hot and
stinking air. The smell was forcing its way past his breathing mask, so that
he had to fight to keep from retching.
Mercer began pulling the tangle apart, trying to separate and identify the
people. The Sun whirled steadily around them, plunging them into darkness for
a few seconds, then sending shadows crawling over the bodies, which gave them
a semblance of movement and life.
Two of the bodies, both male, were covered by thick traceries of nail marks.
It was as if they were wearing red-embroidered body stockings whose patterns
included a large number of solid red flowers-the places where they had used
their teeth on each other. Wet red patches showed on their scalps where hair
had been pulled out, their ears were like raw meat, and he doubted if one of
them had been able to see at the end. Neither of the two men was sweating, nor
did they bleed.
Mrs. Mathewson was also bloody, but it did not seem to be her own. She was at
the bottom of the heap, her head under a piece of plastic screen, which also
covered the air supply outlet in what would have been an effective oxygen tent
if the air being vented had been more than fractionally less foul than that in
the pod itself. There were two large bumps on the right side of her skull, no
depressions, and the side of her face and upper torso showed severe bruising.
She did not appear to be breathing, but her pulse was weak and very rapid.
Mercer slipped the spare mask over her head and turned the air tap on full. He
tried to inflate her lungs by moving her arms rhythmically away and back to
her sides, but he had to be careful because she was so emaciated that he could
actually see two cracked ribs. The pulse began to slow and strengthen,
although she showed no sign of regaining consciousness.
He was dizzy from a combination of the stench, the heat, and sheer relief.
Quickly and carefully he strapped on her air-tank, checked the mask
fastenings, and lifted her in his arms. He bent at the knees and then jumped
for the lock seal eight feet above his head.
The services panel gave under his feet; his center of gravity was not lined up
properly with his center of ft thrust, and they began a slow somersault.
Although the centrifugal force was weak, it was still strong enough to bring
them to a stop three feet short of the seal, and they began to fall slowly
back. When they landed, the pod stretched alarmingly, its walls closed in, and
for an awful moment Mercer thought that the plastic would rupture and burst.
But slowly the capsule resumed its proper shape, and Mercer tried again.
This time he did not jump immediately. Instead, he was made a series of knee
flexions, which set the pod bouncing slowly in and out and its walls pulsing
like some alien artificial heart. He could hardly see, with the sweat pouring
into his eyes, and he knew that if he gave in to the urge to be sick he would
gum up his breathing mask and probably suffocate or collapse from heat
prostration before he could get it cleared. So he persisted, reinforcing the
up and down movement of the services panel until regular contractions
threatened to bounce him away; then he jumped during one particularly strong
upswing.
"The girl is all right," he reported when they were back in his segment. He
hardly recognized his own voice.
"Good. I didn't really think that the air would last."
"It lasted," said Mercer, "because the other two had stopped using it."
"In that case, leave them and mark the pod. Seal up and prepare to break
contact. But before you do, MacArdle says he can utilize your present spin to
boost you towards Neilson and Pod Four. It could save a lot of time, and the
Corries have very little time left. I am closing with Pod Five now and will be
too busy to talk to you for a while, so I'll give you MacArdle-"
"Before you open the seal," said Mercer, "take two anti-nausea tablets and
plug your nostrils with cotton."
"I'm supposed to be giving the orders."
"Doctor's orders," said Mercer firmly, "you have to take."
 Chapter XX.
On the way to the rendezvous with Neilson and Pod Four, Mercer had time to
move Mrs. Mathewson into the bunk below the Captain's and carry out a proper
examination and tape her broken ribs. She still had not regained
consciousness, but the reason, he was sure, was nothing more serious than a
bad concussion. While he worked, the last few pods were nearing the rendezvous
area, and his speaker kept repeating the occupants' complaints about the heat
and shortage of air.
Some of the passengers sounded close to desperation. After his few minutes in
Pod Three, Mercer wondered why they were not raving mad.
Then suddenly it was the slow, deliberate voice of Neilson, relayed through
Prescott's transmitter that was filling his segment.
"I'll be docking with you in a few minutes. Mercer, but don't open your seal
until I tell you. The drill is that I push you close to Four, disengage, then
let you reel them in as you did with Three. I'll position you so that you will
not have to worry about spin. When you have them aboard, dump the pod; then
I'll re-dock and join you. Got that?"
"It sounds almost too easy," said Mercer.
After one unpleasant surprise when he opened the seal-his ears popped
painfully because Four's pressurization was dangerously low-it all went
surprisingly easily. There was no centrifugal force to complicate the rescue,
the pod interior was uncluttered, and both of the Corries were just barely
conscious. It took only a few minutes to float them inside, toss in a marker
grenade with a five-minute delay, seal up, and detach from the pod.
Neilson's segment moved in quickly, nudged the empty pod aside, and locked on.
Mercer turned to see Mrs. Corrie taking off her breathing mask, while her
husband stared through the canopy at the slowly shrinking shape of their
capsule.
Corrie gave a startled grunt when the transparent section of the pod abruptly
changed to a dazzling white.
"A small explosive charge inside a bulb of white paint," Mercer explained. "It
marks the empty pods so that we will know to leave them alone. But you two
will be much more comfortable in bunks-"
"No," said Mrs Corrie, gripping her husband's arm with both hands.
"Excuse me," said Mercer, giving them each a hefty shot of sedative. As their
eyes began to lose focus, he went on: "There is nothing to be afraid of, m'am,
not now. The bunks are designed for seriously ill or injured passengers and
carry their own life-support and waste elimination equipment. They are cool
and roomy-"
"How roomy?" asked Corrie.
"If you are worrying about feeling claustrophobia, don't. You will be asleep
and..."
Neilson arrived at that point, just as Mercer had decided that he knew what
was really worrying Mrs.
Corrie. The engineer was wearing a shiny patina of sweat and had his cap
pulled well down over his eyes. Mercer wondered if Neilson had a bald patch
and was self-conscious about it; then he realized that it was a means of
protecting the engineer's eyes while checking marker stars close to the Sun.
He turned back to the Corries.
"I expect you don't want to be separated after all that you've been through,"
he said. "That is quite all right-the bunks are big enough to fit two in a
pinch. But I'll have to increase the air supply accordingly..."
Neilson made the necessary adjustments and helped Mercer fit the already
sleeping couple into their bunk. "I don't approve of single beds, either,"
said the engineer.
"Head to toe like that, there isn't much risk of them suffocating unless
someone puts a foot in the other's mouth," said Mercer worriedly. "But I think
I'll leave the sides open and keep an eye on them anyway. It's nice to see
you, Neilson."
"Likewise, Mercer."
"Prescott. Delay your reunion celebrations, please.
MacArdle has some figures for you..."
A few minutes later, Neilson had instructions for Mercer.
"We have to reach Pods One and Nine as quickly as possible," said the
engineer, removing the cover of Mercer's thrust panel as he spoke, "and
pushing you ahead of me will waste too much time. So I want you to apply
thrust to your segment while I do the same with mine-that way we will approach
the targets broadside on but much faster. Ignore all the pretty lights unless
they suddenly turn red. Depress this stud when I tell you-I'll give you a
five-second countdown-and release it when I yell 'Cut.'"
"The procedure is the same when we close with the pods, which are only a short
distance apart," he added. "But first I have to get us properly lined up."
"Two pods in trouble," said Mercer, reaching for the switch of the passenger
transmitter. "That's six people -no, seven, because Ten has four aboard-and we
do not have an unlimited number of empty bunks."
"Don't touch it, Mercer," said Neilson sharply.
"Prescott has been monitoring that frequency while you were busy, and I don't
want anything to distract you until we're on our way. And anyhow, you have
established a useful precedent with the Corries..."
The passengers in Pods One and Nine were in no condition to object to being
packed in two to a bunk- they were much too relieved at being able to breathe
relatively cool air again, and for the few minutes which it took for the
sedative shots to take effect. Mercer let then assume that such overcrowding
was normal.
While he was dealing with them he could not help noticing the bunk temperature
gauges, which showed the differential between the segment as a whole and that
being experienced by his patients. The new arrivals were generating a lot of
extra heat, and Mercer could feel as well as see the difference.
Before the engineer could rejoin Mercer, Prescott was telling them that
MacArdle had more figures for them. Pod Six was running out of air now.
Neilson estimated that they would need twenty minutes to reach them.
When they were on their way, Mercer asked about Pod Eight, which had
accelerated past the rendezvous and been chased by MacArdle. He had been out
of touch and nobody had mentioned them recently.
"That was quite a chase, Mercer. It will take me five hours to get back there,
but 1 have them aboard."
"Are they all right?"
"Two of them are doing fine. But the other man, Saddler, is running a bluff
with a pair of threes."
"Prescott. When you've dealt with Six, there are two other pods. Ten and
Thirteen, who will be in bad trouble by then. Give Neilson their markers,
MacArdle, or would you rather watch the poker game?"
"How," whispered Mercer, "does he know which pods are in trouble?"
"He noted their positions as they came in," said Neilson quietly, "and his
telescope brings in the pods that went wide. From his position they have a
wide angle of separation, so he lines up his directional antenna on the
telescope bearing. This increases the strength of any given pod's signal and
so he knows who is calling for help even if they don't identify themselves, or
even if they are so short of air that they can't speak."
"Do we have a dish antenna?" Mercer asked. "I was thinking that it might
operate in reverse to allow me to speak to a pod without all the other pods
hearing the message."
Neilson shook his head. "Only the Captain's segment has such refinements, and
normally the dish is used to maintain two-way contact with Eurydice Control.
But now Prescott is using it on the pod frequency, because if Control and
MacArdle haven't done their calculations right, there isn't much point in
wasting time talking to Earth with passengers in trouble only a few miles
away..."
"Suppose MacArdle or Control haven't-" began Mercer.
"... This segment, on the other hand," Neilson went on firmly, "has no
sophisticated communications equipment, a relatively small fuel reserve, and
quite a lot of power and air reserves-a life raft, Mercer, is what we're in."
"If I'd known that," said Mercer, "I might have wasted a little of the power
keeping the place cooler. But about the recovery ship-"
"You will be very glad that you didn't," said Neilson very seriously. "This
segment takes thirteen passengers and a crew of two, comfortably. So far
you've squeezed in ten passengers and have saved on space because most of them
have doubled up. Trouble is, you can't double the air supply. Our segments
have less elbowroom and can take three survivors in a pinch, and how Prescott
is managing with four I shudder to think.
"Why don't you take a few minutes to visit my place?" he added. "It's through
the airlock and then straight ahead. You can't miss it."
"Are you trying to be funny, Neilson?" Mercer said harshly. "Trying to humor
me, perhaps, so that I won't ask awkward questions? Do you know when the
recovery ship is due?"
"If I did know I might not tell you. You would only worry if it was a little
late."
"I'm not completely stupid. If it doesn't arrive exactly on time, that means
it has gone wide and won't arrive at all. That is so, isn't it?"
Neilson did not reply. Instead he cocked his head to one side and said, "One
of your patients wants out."
The Captain was tapping the inside of his bunk and growing audibly more
impatient with every passing second. Mercer started to say that Collingwood
had no business being awake at all, then stopped because he realized that he
must have missed giving the Captain his last sedative shot. He moved quickly
to the bunk, opened the side, and slid the litter far enough out to see what
his patient was doing. He had another shot ready, but it would take a few
minutes for it to take effect, and longer if Collingwood was trying to resist
it.
He hoped the Captain would not start to act up- not now, with Neilson here,
most of the other bunks filled with lightly sleeping passengers, and less than
fifteen minutes to go before they picked up another batch of survivors.
Collingwood had stopped tapping and was using his fingers to explore the
bandages covering his eyes. He winced as the needle slid in, then said
sharply, "Who is that?"
"Mercer, sir."
Neilson drifted up and gave a little sigh of sympathy as he saw the bandages,
the lead shielding on Collingwood's chest and side, and the livid
decompression blotches covering the Captain's body. He withdrew again without
speaking.
"I've lost count of the times that I have begun to come to," said the Captain,
"and you've jabbed me to sleep again. I want out of this thing. Mercer-even if
I can't see, I can still hear, speak and think, dammit. And I should be
getting exercise to prevent muscle atrophy and other ... But you're the doctor
and should know all about that."
"Yes, sir," said Mercer. "That was done while you were out-gentle exercise and
massage every four hours. But I strongly advise you to stay put, sir. Movement
of any kind could aggravate your present condition-"
"Which is?"
The shot was showing no sign of taking effect and, Mercer knew, the Captain
was demanding nothing more or less than a condition report on the hunk of
sophisticated organic machinery that was his body, and it was very obvious
that he did not want the report colored by medical double-talk. Through the
canopy behind Neilson he could see their next pod growing slowly larger, so he
told the Captain about his condition and the various reasons why he should not
move or risk exposing his damaged eyes to the light. He kept it brief and to
the point, and completely accurate.
"But you must have changed the dressings while I was sleeping," Collingwood
said when he had finished.
"And presumably the damage caused by dim light is no greater when I am awake
than asleep. I want to know if I can see, Doctor. And while you are taking off
the dressings you can tell me about the condition of your segment, the other
crew segments and the pods..."
He had other questions as well, and there was still no sign of the sedative
taking effect.
Mercer looked appealingly at Neilson, who moved closer and began answering the
more technical questions as the last few layers were being removed. Mercer was
relieved to discover that his segment was in good shape, pleased that Neilson
thought him something less than wasteful of its power reserves, and surprised
at the multiplicity of activities of the other officers during times when
Mercer had thought he was the only one doing any work-reassuring the
passengers had been a very small job compared to that of organizing their
rescue.
When the bandages and pads were off, Collingwood kept his eyes closed while
Neilson went on speaking.
Perhaps he is asleep at last. Mercer thought, or maybe he's just afraid to
look in case there is nothing to see.
"If opening your eyes feels as if it might hurt them," Mercer said, "don't do
it. We're turned away from the Sun, and the only light is coming from a pod
about half a mile away, so it may be too dim for anything at all to
register..."
Collingwood opened his eyes then. In the dim light the whites looked almost as
dark as the irises-they were still very bloodshot-and smeared with cream.
Mercer saw them twitch from side to side, then up and down, then the Captain
sighed and closed them.
"I can't stay awake any longer," he said, "and Prescott is doing all the right
things. But a word of advice, Mercer. Before you meet him again, shave, and
for god's sake put on some clothes..."
Neilson's sigh of relief warmed the back of his neck as Mercer began replacing
the dressings, and the mental picture that he had been seeing of an ex-Captain
Collingwood, blind and with a lung burned out and probably cancerous, being
led around by his beautiful young wife until she became his prematurely aged
widow, faded away. Suddenly he laughed and said, "He can see."
"Yes," said Neilson, "but we're due to decelerate m three minutes. You know
the drill."
At first Mercer was sure that Prescott had directed them to the wrong pod, one
that was already marked as being empty. But when he opened the seal he
discovered that the life-support system must have packed up only a few minutes
earlier, and that the pod interior was filled with a dense, stinking fog. He
had to grope through the weightless welter of plastic screens, clothing and
other drifting debris for something which felt like part of a human being. He
found two of them near the services panel and pushed them gently towards the
seal at the opposite side of the capsule.
The third survivor found him, wrapping his or her arms tightly around his neck
from the back like someone who was drowning. The breathing mask was knocked
away from his face and suddenly Mercer was drowning, too, in air, which had to
be too foul to support life. He lost his bearings as well, and could not even
guess where the seal was. He kicked hard against anything solid or near solid
with which he came in contact, sending the passenger and himself bouncing
blindly between the plastic walls of the pod. By sheer luck he found himself
tumbling into his segment, which was by then also filled with stinking fog.
A few minutes later, while the active survivor was helping him resuscitate his
two companions, Neilson put his head and shoulders in to say, "Prescott has
another one for us. We're already lined up. Seven seconds thrust, five seconds
countdown. Your mouth is bleeding, Mercer."
While Neilson and Mercer emptied three more pods, the Mathewson boy in
Fourteen was given his marker stars and thrust timing, with Fifteen and
Sixteen timed to arrive a few minutes later. When they came aboard, the last
batch of passengers said that Mercer's segment smelled worse than the pod they
had just left, that it was much hotter as well, and had he anything to eat?
Mercer told them that talking wasted air, and he tried to find a place for
them where they would not be in the way during the next rescue operation-the
last rescue operation, Mercer was sure, because his segment and its services
were becoming dangerously overloaded.
Neilson had locked his control panel against accidental activation and placed
three passengers in his segment. Two more drifted between the connecting
seals, their feet in the engineer's vehicle and their heads in Mercer's
segment. The bunks now held eighteen, and the spaces between, another two,
excluding Neilson and Mercer, who were pressed against a canopy that was
virtually opaque with condensation.
From time to time they rubbed it with sweating hands to search the blurred
stars for the recovery ship.
Despite everything that Mercer told them about conserving energy and air, the
passengers were beginning to argue and push and ask why two of the bunk sides
were still up when all the others were down and contributing their quota of
air to the rest of the passengers.
The occupants of the bunks, whose original sedative shots were beginning to
wear off, had begun to complain about being hot and cramped and unable to
breathe, while the people outside were angrily offering to change places with
them.
"Those two bunks contain patients, as opposed to mere survivors," said Mercer
sharply. "Neither of them is pleasant to look at, and one of them, the
Captain, is slightly radioactive..."
He went on to describe the Captain's injuries in detail, the recovery of his
sight, and his poor chance of survival if some method of removing the two
specks of radioactive material in his lung was not discovered within the next
few weeks. Medical facilities on board the recovery ship would be no better
than those on Eurydice, and if Collingwood was not treated soon, although he
would still be alive at the end of the voyage, it would only be for a couple
of years after that.
As he continued talking, Mercer knew that he had their undivided attention,
and he realized once again why morale was always good in a hospital
ward-suffering shared was suffering halved, and there was always somebody
there in poorer shape than oneself. He was also doing his best to take their
minds forward to the time when they would be in the recovery ship, and past
the time in the not-too-distant future when the ship might or might not
arrive. He could see them thinking about the Captain's misfortunes instead of
their own, and a few of them were putting forward suggestions for treatment
when there was an interruption.
The First Officer was trying to give them something else to think about as
well.
"Prescott. Switch on your pod frequency. Mercer."
Mercer pushed between two passengers to do so, and heard the Mathewson boy's
voice.
"... Didn't answer last time because Mr. Prescott gag said you were busy with
passengers, but you can talk to me now. Pod Fourteen retro burn complete, and
I can see two other pods ..."
"Prescott. We have him."
"... and one of them is all white. What do I do now, Mercer?"
"Nice shooting, Mathewson," said Mercer warmly.
"We have you in sight. Your orders? Well, keep a sharp lookout for the
recovery ship, but don't look at or near the Sun without goggles. Acknowledge,
please."
"Pod Fourteen. Will do."
But the concern of the passengers for the Captain and' their relief at the
Mathewson boy's safe arrival in the rendezvous area were short-lived emotions,
and soon they were saying that the boy was lucky to have a pod's air and food
supply all to himself, that the recovery ship was not coming, that it would be
impossible to see it if it did come with the canopy fogged with condensation,
that it was hot, and that if some unprintable didn't keep his feet out of
someone else's mouth he would get them bitten off.
"You must understand," said Mercer, trying not to gasp between words as
everyone else was doing, "that we and the other pods and segments are
following our original course for Ganymede and will arrive exactly on time.
The recovery ship is virtually identical to Eurydice except for the extra
boosters, which enable it to catch up with us and decelerate to match our
velocity, and which also make it impossible for it to be manned, because no
human being could survive the enormous acceleration. These boosters are very
powerful, and if they are fired in the rendezvous area we, or some of us at
least, might suffer even more from the heat. So the recovery ship has got to
feel its way in, guided by the First Officer, and the time of arrival is
dictated by considerations of survivor safety. It could be only minutes away,
or a couple of hours. Isn't that so, Neilson?"
The engineer rubbed at the canopy condensation with one hand. Three fingers
were outspread with the thumb bent inwards, indicating three, possibly
three-and-a-half hours. Aloud, he said, "That is an oversimplification,
Mercer, but essentially correct."
His expression, which only Mercer could see, was saying Lies, all lies.
Three or more hours, Mercer thought. He went on, "And we have ample air and
power to last out?"
"Yes, of course," said Neilson, but his expression had not changed.
Nobody spoke for a few minutes, but Mercer knew that they would speak soon.
Then they would start pushing and cursing and fighting, for no other reasons
than that it was hot and stuffy and that these were the worst things they
could do.
Mercer wiped sweat from his forearm and saw fresh globules grow a few seconds
later. He had never been a compulsive extrovert, never enjoyed the shouting,
sweating proximity of his fellow men even when it had been necessary on
various occasions. He knew, with an awful certainty, that he could not take
much more of this and that he would probably be the one who started the
chain-reaction of violence, for the simple reason that he had either to get
out of it or end it.
The heat and humidity was worse than it had been in many of the pods he had
entered. He could understand how Kirk and Stone had felt, although their
original reason for fighting had been much stronger, if not better, than his.
Either he had to get out, or he wanted all the other quarreling, stinking
people to get out.
He suddenly realized that he could put them out, although not literally...
"Mr. Neilson and I will have to sweat it out," Mercer said, forcing a laugh so
that they would all know he was making a joke, "but there is no necessity for
the rest of you to share our discomfort. What I am -proposing isn't in
accordance with company regulations, of course, which state that medical
stores should be used only on passengers who are ill or injured. Apart from
being hungry and a little short of breath, there is nothing wrong with you
people, but you would be still more comfortable if-"
"If the air is so scarce," said a man beside him in a voice close to being
hysterical, "why the hell are you talking so much?"
Mercer closed his eyes for a moment, fighting a sudden and incredibly violent
urge to batter the hateful, unshaven face and hunger-and-heat-emaciated body
until it looked like the two he had left in Pod Three. But he knew that once
he started he would not be able to stop with this one stupid, sarcastic
passenger-he would go berserk among them all, until they were all quiet and
probably all dead. He wondered why he was having these intensely violent
thoughts; then he felt the heat and stench and the sweaty pressure of bodies
all around him and decided that he was in hell and that in hell everybody
acted like the Devil.
"If I talk, everyone else listens, sir," he said, opening his eyes, "and that
saves more air than if everyone talks.
What I intend to do is give some of you the opportunity of taking special
shots-a form of mild sedative, really, which also opens the pores and makes it
feel cooler even if it isn't. I will use a spray injection hypo, which is
quite painless, and if you'll give me just a moment I'll demonstrate..."
It wasn't all lies, Mercer told himself cynically. The shots were painless,
but the recipients would feel cooler and more comfortable because they would
be out cold for the next three hours. And if he pretended that there were not
enough shots to go around, that he was doing most of them a favor, they might
not resist the idea until it was too late. Certainly the first three did not
resist, possibly because he had led them to believe that he was still
demonstrating the painlessness of the procedure and nothing else. Still
talking reassuringly, he injected any arm or thigh that presented itself.
He looked at Neilson, who nodded and wriggled alongside him and began moving
the suddenly relaxed bodies out of the way, holding the ones who argued or
tried to break free, and closing bunks so that Mercer could reach the
passengers in the lower tiers. Only one passenger, the last one of the three
packed into Neilson's segment, put up any resistance. She said, "We're not
going to wake up again, are we?"
"No, m'am," said Mercer, "at least, not in here."
Silently he added, We hope.
A few minutes later, Neilson gently cleared the space above his panel of
drifting bodies and said, "Putting them out was a good idea, Mercer. I've
rechecked my calculations, and provided we don't waste air in needless
discussion, we might just make it."
"Fine," said Mercer.
"I'm not trying to tell you your job, Mercer he went on, "but you might have
to use a little energy checking that these sleeping beauties don't drift too
close to each other and smother. Or have you got that under control?"
"Yes."
"It's hot."
"Yes."
"About the Captain, Mercer. I should have told you earlier, but the passengers
were so interested in his troubles that I didn't want to spoil things for
them. We reported what you said about his condition before Eurydice blew, and
the recovery ship will be carrying the special instruments you need to operate
on him and withdraw the radioactive materials."
"That's great."
"Prescott will be acting Captain for the rest of the trip out and
back-Collingwood won't be able to assume command again until he has passed the
Earth-side medical. Prescott should have been Captain anyway, but the company
thought he lacked charm for a passenger ship skipper and put Collingwood in
with Prescott to keep him right. The Captain was strictly a station shuttle
man-a nice person, but it wasn't fair on Prescott. He is tops in this
profession, but he needs something-"
"A good PR man?"
"Yeah. But we shouldn't waste air talking all the time."
"You are doing most of it."
"Listen, Mercer, are you asking for a punch in the-"
 "Prescott. The remaining pods seem to be in no immediate danger, with the
exception of one. There is a life-support system failure with toxic wastes
escaping into the living space. This is an urgent one, Mercer. Can you squeeze
in three more?"
The three survivors were sedated just as soon as Mercer was sure that they
were still alive. Then he burrowed and pushed until he found spaces for them,
and returned to the canopy to rest for the effort of burrowing in again a few
minutes later to make sure that nobody was smothering. That effort increased
the heat being generated inside the segment, and the precaution did not seem
to be really necessary. Twice he nearly passed out, and once he almost
panicked. Only the thought of Kirk as he had last seen him saved Mercer from
tearing and kicking at the bodies that were pressing in all around him.
In a way, Kirk's reaction had been normal. He had known that he was going to
die and had decided to enjoy himself first. But the hot, intimate contact of
flesh did not stir Mercer, even though, like Kirk, he was sure that he was
going to die shortly. He began to wonder why, and if there was anything wrong
with him. But then he began to realize that all there was wrong with him was a
recently contracted and serious case of monogamy, because the only close
contact he wanted or would enjoy would be with the patient in bunk Three.
He did not go among the passengers again, but stayed close to the canopy,
fighting for every breath and sweating from every pore. This atmosphere is
unsuited to human life, he told himself, so why don't we all die?
But they did not die, and some of the passengers seemed to be moving, waking
up-but it was only Neilson pushing his way through to the canopy.
"I thought it might be cooler here," he said. "It isn't."
Mercer wiped at the plastic without speaking.
"I feel like a living fish in a can of sardines," said Neilson, then added,
"Sorry, I'm talking."
The silence stretched for a sweating, stifling eternity, and when it was
broken, the voice was not using their precious air.
"Pod Fourteen; Mathewson. Come in. Mercer."
The voice was without expression, just like that of a real spaceman in an
emergency. Mercer wondered what had gone wrong in Fourteen and if he could
squeeze in one more. It would have to be a bad emergency for the medical
segment to be a sanctuary, but it was only right that a mother and son should
be together at the end.
"Mercer," he said.
"I ... I have visual contact with the recovery ship, Mercer."
"Prescott. Confirmed. MacArdle - will have the figures for you in-"
They lost Prescott for a few minutes then because the Mathewson boy had lost
control and was whooping like an Indian, and Neilson and Mercer were joining
him.
 Chapter XXI.
The recovery ship differed from Eurydice in that it had two passenger locks
aft instead of one, a feature designed to speed the re-embarkation of
survivors. Neilson nudged Mercer's segment against one and used the other to
dock his own vehicle; but it was a very close thing, because Mercer's head was
pounding and throbbing, and black splotches were blotting out his vision when
he hit the quick-release on his seal. Then the hot, putrid air was rushing
past him and cool, dry air began seeping back. He crawled out, shivering, to
find Neilson already waiting for him.
"We'll have to go after the others as soon as possible," said the engineer
briskly. "Do you mind if I don't help you unload this bunch? If I can
concentrate on replenishing your segment with power cells, air tanks, and fuel
cartridges, we could be ready to go in thirty minutes."
Mercer nodded. He began moving out the sleeping passengers and floating them
carefully into the main compartment, which now seemed to be enormous. He began
with the people in Neilson's segment, because it had to be jettisoned to allow
Prescott, who was estimating contact with the recovery ship in twenty minutes,
to dock. MacArdle and his passengers were due half an hour later, by which
time Prescott's segment would have been turned loose. Mercer's vehicle was the
one designed for fast rescue work, so long as there was at least one trained
astronaut aboard to fly it.
The last two people he moved out were the Captain and Mrs. Mathewson, and
these he took up to sick bay.
The place gave him the strangest feeling of disorientation because it was
exactly the same as the place he had just left, except for its fresh,
newly-minted look.
On his way he saw that the people drifting about the passenger compartment
were showing signs of animation. He checked his dive, letting Mrs. Mathewson
and the Captain fall slowly ahead of him, while he spoke to them.
The manual had told him what to say. He had read that particular section over
and over again during the past two weeks, like a fairy story, which he had
never expected to come true.
"Your attention, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "As you can see, your couches
are already arranged in cruising mode and numbered as were the positions in
Eurydice. In the usual compartments you will find food and fresh clothing.
Will you please go to your original couches, strap in, talk as much as you
want to, but keep the center of this compartment clear. For the next few hours
the ship's officers will be bringing in the remaining survivors and doing
other necessary jobs, and you may feel that you are being ignored, but things
will soon return to normal.
"By the day after tomorrow," he added, smiling, "I may even be able to arrange
a swim in the tank."
When he had completed his check on the Captain, he replaced the blankets
removed during the superheated period in the other segment and immobilized
Collingwood with webbing. The bunks were not cold, but the feel of blankets
would give a sense of security, and Mrs. Mathewson certainly needed that. But
she came to just as he was about to slide back her bunk, and she began to
struggle against the webbing and blanket with increasing violence.
Instinctively he put out his hands to restrain her, then he remembered the
position and severity of some of her bruises and reached for the hypo instead.
"Take it easy, m'am," he said gently. ''You're safe now."
She stopped struggling and said, "Mercer?"
"Yes, m'am."
He knew that he should sedate her quickly before she had a chance to think, to
remember. But she could not go through the rest of her life under sedation,
and it was important that she should try to face those ugly memories as soon
as possible-not completely, of course, but in easy stages. He desperately
wanted to see her reactions, to get some idea whether or not she would be able
to handle it, before he used the hypo. Neilson hadn't called him, so there was
still a little time before he had to leave.
"Bobby?"
"He's safe, too, but still in his pod. You must understand that having it to
himself means that he won't run out of air as quickly as the others. We have
to bring him in last, m'am."
"I know. You could give him no preferential treatment. You acted as if he was
a man."
"He did a man's job, m'am, and when he cried like a frightened little boy for
his mother, I pretended not to hear."
"And you brought him back. I'm grateful. I might not sound it, but I am. You
treated him exactly right, said all the proper things-to all of us, not just
to Bobby. You were always cool, calm and ... and nothing seemed to touch you
or change you in any way. I suppose I should be glad, we should all be glad,
that you weren't an over-sympathetic character..."
As she fell silent, Mercer thought that clinically he was very pleased with
her reactions, but that on the personal level he was coming off very badly. He
wished he could relax and stop saying 'm'am' and radiating the composure which
he most decidedly did not feel.
"I'm not supposed to display signs of weakness in front of the passengers,"
Mercer said irritably, "and especially not before my patients, but if you knew
me better you would realize that I could be quite bad-tempered at times, and
jealous, and very, very angry in certain circumstances-"
"I'm sorry, Doctor," she broke in. "I don't know why I'm picking on you like
this." She put her hand out of the blanket and gripped his, the one which
wasn't holding the hypo, and went on: "Don't put me out again just yet. I'm
picking on you because I can't get nasty with myself-at least, not out loud.
When you were talking to us back there I could tell that you were angry
sometimes, and that you couldn't afford to show it because everybody else was
listening and would have known what was going on in Three. But you knew, and
you made Kirk and Stone mad at you because you were like an over-amplified
voice of conscience. You kept heading them off, talking sense, lecturing them.
If it hadn't been for you, it would have happened much sooner. Are they both
... both...?"
Her grip was so tight that his fingers were turning white. He nodded.
"Maybe I should not have been so hard to get," she went on, but pleading with
him with her eyes to argue and disagree with everything she was saying. "These
days nobody would have worried, would they? And you would not have talked
about it. But they were strangers, just like my husband was several different
kinds of stranger before he died, and all the different strangers wanted to
make love to me. And it was so open out there, so clean and bright and empty,
so I couldn't-it would have been like sinning in Heaven.
"But I could have forced myself, and once I almost did," she said, looking
away from him. "If they'd had me, they might not have started fighting."
Mercer shook his head. "Then I would have had to lecture you, at very
inconvenient times, about the need to avoid generating heat."
Still she would not look at him as she said, "After he knocked me out, what
happened?"
"Nothing much," said Mercer. "He became angry and frustrated, very angry and
extremely frustrated from what I could hear-and I was listening very
carefully, you understand. Then he collapsed and died from heat-stroke a few
minutes later, leaving just enough air to keep you alive until I arrived. But
you should try to forget all about it, you know. It's over. And you've a grip
like a wrestler, m'am. If I'm to perform any more miracles of surgery you'd
better not break my fingers."
"You aren't telling the truth," she said angrily, still without letting go.
"You know it is important to me, and you just want me to think-"
"It's important to me, too," Mercer broke in quietly. "Not vitally important,
you understand, but still important enough to make me glad that I'm not
lying."
"I'm not sure that I understand you," she said, but her expression said that
she did, and her grip on his hand eased. She added, "Will I have to tell
people about it? Will there be an investigation?"
"Not unless you want to," said Mercer. "So far as I'm concerned, I don't
really know who did what to whom. Both men were unrecognizable when I got to
them, and once I knew that they were dead and you weren't, I couldn't waste
time reconstructing the crime. If you like, I can say, quite truthfully, that
one died from asphyxiation and one from heat-stroke. That isn't the whole
truth, of course, but I'm thinking about Mrs. Kirk's feelings as well as yours
and Bobby's, and even you don't know for sure what happened at the end. Nobody
has jurisdiction in space-wreck incidents like this, so there is no point in
talking about it if you don't want to. The only people who would be interested
are the news media, and they-"
"No," she said firmly.
"I didn't think you would want that," he said, bringing up the hypo. "So just
try to forget the whole thing for the time being, and sleep. And let go of my
hand.
You'll be in this bunk until your cracked ribs mend, so you can expect to see
a lot more of me..."
He stopped. She was laughing, and wincing, because it must have been hurting
her ribs.
"Is that possible?" she said.
Mercer smiled in return. "I can't answer that, m'am, until you are completely
recovered. There are rules about doctor-patient relationships, you know."
Before she could reply he had tucked her bare arm under the blanket and closed
the bunk.
She had made him aware for the first time m two weeks that he was improperly
dressed, that he was not even wearing a cap, as Neilson was, and that they
were no longer in an emergency situation in which such lapses could be
excused. He still had a few minutes to spare before the engineer needed him,
so he shaved, climbed into a set of clean uniform coveralls, and used the
canopy plastic to check that his cap was straight. The sooner everything
returned to normal the better, he thought as he turned to go.
"Neilson. I - will need you in ten minutes, Mercer- this took a little longer
than expected. Prescott is back on board and wants to see you in the
control-room."
"Mercer. Ten minutes."
The First Officer was in Neilson's position, going over the engineering
tell-tales. He looked at Mercer slowly from head to toes and shook his head.
He said, "Before you leave to pick up the rest of the survivors, I want you to
remember that there will be an inquiry when we get back to Earth into the
Eurydice disaster and the proper functioning or otherwise of its survival
equipment. Neilson, MacArdle and myself will be responsible for the technical
evidence, and you will deal with questions regarding the effects on
passengers. You will also have to give medical evidence regarding the deaths
of Kirk and Stone."
"Heat-stroke, asphyxiation, and heart failure," said Mercer.
Prescott nodded. "Mrs. Mathewson's story might not agree with yours, and while
I realize that she will not be returning to Earth, it could be awkward if-"
"She wants to forget about it and so do I," said Mercer firmly. "That was my
professional advice as well. There is also the fact that the media, if they
got their hands on it, would be sure to imply all sorts of things which did
not in fact happen. You see, both men were in such a mess that I don't know,
from my very brief observation of their bodies, who killed who. It is
possible, although not likely, that Stone made a comeback after Mrs. Mathewson
was knocked out, so even she can't be sure. Then there are the possible
effects on the boy of reading that sort of stuff about his mother, or finding
out about it in later life. She won't talk about it, you can be sure of that."
Prescott looked relieved, but not completely. He said, "That's good. I told
Mrs, Kirk about her husband on the way in-I said that his death was due to his
being overweight combined with the heat and low oxygen content of the air. She
could suffer, too, if it got out that he died fighting over a woman. But I'm
more concerned about you, Mercer, and what you may say when we get back. We
are all going to be heroes, you especially, and you could earn a lot of money
from the media simply by telling the truth as you know it.
"I couldn't really blame you for doing that," he ended, "especially as you
only wanted space experience to land a good research job on Station Three-"
"If you don't mind," said Mercer, "I would like a little more space
experience-of a less dramatic nature, of course. And in any case, I am more
interested in a job on Ganymede Base now. I don't want to embarrass the
Mathewsons, or Mrs. Kirk, so if I can stay with the ship and toe the company
line during the enquiry-"
"I'll be Captain," said Prescott.
"You almost dissuade me."
"I wasn't trying to do that," said Prescott quietly, "just trying to give you
fair warning that I am a consistently nasty person who is unlikely to change
anything but his uniform."
"Neilson. We'll be ready to go in three minutes, Mercer."
As he turned to go. Mercer wondered if he would change very much. He was
thinking of a very young boy who had played spaceman for two long and
dangerous weeks, and of his mother, who would soon have him with her again. He
had helped to save both of their lives and was beginning to feel responsible
for them in an oddly possessive way, and the voyage was less than three weeks
gone. It was a silly question, because he had changed in many ways already.